ATI 5870 – Installation of the “Beast”
Monday, February 15, 2010 by Island Dog | Discussion: Personal Computing
As you might have read in my earlier post , I received an ATI 5870 video card and I had to nickname it “the beast”, because this sucker is big, and that’s just how I like it. I’m upgrading from an ATI 4850, which is another fabulous video card, but I’m certainly not going to deny myself the opportunity to try out this latest one.
If you are interested in all the fancy numbers, you can view the technical specs here , but here are the main features from the ATI site.
- Get unrivalled visual quality and intense gaming performance and for today and tomorrow with support for Microsoft® DirectX® 11
- With ATI Eyefinity technology get the ultimate immersive gaming experience innovative ‘wrap around’ multi-display capabilities
- Tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with ATI Stream technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed
- Feel the brute strength of more than 2 teraFLOPS plowing through the most demanding games
- Experience the speed, responsiveness and performance of ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory
- ATI CrossFireX™ technology with multi-GPU support offers advanced scalability
As you can see in the images above, this is obviously a dual-slot card, meaning it’s going to take up two spots on the back of your PC. This wasn’t a problem for me as I don’t have any other PCI cards installed, but it’s something you need to take into consideration. Installation was quick, just make sure both slots are free, snap in the card, and hook in the power. After making sure it was securely in, it was ready to go. Next step was booting up and installing the latest Catalyst drivers, which is a straightforward installation and I didn’t run into any issues whatsoever.
On the card it has two DVI outputs, an HDMI output, and a DisplayPort output. In my current setup I have two 22” widescreen monitors hooked up to the DVI ports. I’m still contemplating on what to do with the HDMI port. Anyways, after the driver installation I had to go into the display properties and easily configure Windows 7 to setup the dual-monitors to display as I want them to which is the main monitor on the right, and the second on the left.
I just installed this a day ago, so I’m going to break it in for a bit, and then follow-up with a review on the performance of the card from a user point of view, not the super technical number crunches you often see.
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Reply #81 Friday, April 9, 2010 2:47 PM
I'm considering the cheaper W7 OEM. Is there any real gaming benifit to spending more?