Customer Reviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1 GB DDR5 Dual DVI-I/HDMI/DP PCI-Express Graphics Card 100281-3SR

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Up and running in crossfire and eyefinity with a core i7 930, EVGA X58 Micro ATX, 6gb Corsair Dominator DDR3 and Corair 850HX.

Combined total resolution of 5760x1080. Cards have been ROCK solid, absolutely no problems. Really impressed with ATI this time around.

Would absolutely consider buying again. I am not a fanboi, had SLI GTX285's in my rig before this one.

This is actually my second card, and it's sitting in the box. My motherboard doesn't support two cards at PCIe x16. When I plug in the second one, I'm limited to x8, resulting in a net loss of frames, from 70-80 FPS to 40-50 FPS. Therefore I'm holding on to it until I upgrade my MoBo.

But the Eyefinity is fantastic; when I first tried gaming across three screens, I got headaches. Now when I try to game on a single display, I feel like I'm wearing blinders.

Great card! Not thrilled with ATI's drivers, but if you're reading this review, you are probably already aware of that...

I got this card to replace my old 8800 GT (R.I.P), all the games run flawlessly, although every once in a while i get a grey screen but nothing to worry about 'cause that happens with any ATI card or Nvidia in demanding games like bad company 2 , it's been 9 months running games with it, i'm very happy, it's a nice card, go for it...

I have always owned NVIDIA, but I thought I would give the Radeon 5870 a shot since it was the best deal at the moment. It definitely felt like a next generation video card compared to my 8800 GTS 512mb NVIDIA card. I was able to play Crysis on 1920 X 1200 resolution on very high settings with no AA at 40 FPS. This felt like the sweet spot. You could turn AA up to 2, 4 or 8X but gameplay did not feel smooth and ran about 30 FPS. If your monitor only supports 1650 x 1050 then you will get 40 FPS on Max settings with AA at 8x which played very smooth.

Unfortunately, even though the video card performed well I am returning it. I never got the grey screen crash, but I did get a red screen crash a couple times when playing Unreal Tournament 3 with driver 10.3. But, the reason I had to send it back was after playing for about an hour I would get artifacts all over the screen. Apparently, there have been a few reports of this not just with sapphire brand but all ATI 5870 cards. And people are still complaining of crashes.

Luckily this happened within the 30 day grace period to return the card. I don't feel comfortable taking a chance on another 5870 card and having it fail after the grace period and dealing with crashes that still haven't been fixed with their drivers. I decided to down grade to EVGA GTX 470 SC edition running at $389. Some think I am crazy spending about the same price on a card the under performs the 5870, but I want a video card I can depend on with great customer service at EVGA and frequent driver updates.

This is a good card and the image quality is awesome, unfortunatelly it overheats very easy and you need to make sure YOU DON'T INSTALL THE LATEST DRIVERS because they will fail. Install older drivers and it works good. Additionally you need to have a power supply above 600 watts and also a big and very well ventilated computer case that allows good airflow (cooler master boxes like HAF or similar in other brands), otherwise your card is going to overheat and will show you a black or grey screen and your computer will crash.