Asus Radeon HD 5870 Voltage Tweak Review

Results Analysis

While the Asus ATI Radeon HD 5870 might ship with the standard stock clocks out of the box, that still makes it the fastest single GPU card currently available, posting some ferociously fast frame rates right across our battery of benchmarks. In Fallout 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and Dawn of War 2 it’s untouchable at the top of our results graphs and in Crysis and Call of Duty it’s only the dual GPU GTX 295 that’s able to eclipse it. Of course, the GTX 295 is an SLI card and thus at the mercy of driver optimisations, with the single GPU of the HD 5870 less susceptible to driver irregularities.

We knew the HD 5870 was a monster going into this review though – it’s the Voltage Tweaking overclocking that puts this card apart from the competition and we’re glad to say we saw a huge improvement over a stock card when it came to squeezing some extra juice out of the Cypress GPU.

A stock HD 5870 will struggle to surpass a core clock speed of 925MHz but by upping the Vcore to 1.33v we were able to surpass 1GHz, maxing out at 1,005MHz! While our memory overclocking efforts remained at 1,300MHz (5,200MHz effective) and were unaffected by the increased Vcore, the real world performance improvement is mighty impressive, with ten percent improvements over stock performance in Crysis frame rates – not bad for a free software inclusion!


Sadly pumping so much extra voltage through the 40nm GPU has some serious knock on consequences when it comes to thermal output and the HD 5870 goes from being the coolest GPU under load to the hottest, with operating temperatures rising by over 40°C. This also saw the card’s cooling fan spin up dramatically, with the Asus HD 5870 becoming painfully audible over the already significant background noise of our labs. Vcore overclocking the HD 5870 might net you a healthy slice of extra performance then, but you’ll pay for it with a much noisier cooler unless you've fitted a waterblock and watercooling.

Value and Final Thoughts

AMD has been surprisingly fair when it’s come to HD 5870 pricing considering it’s a flagship high end card with no direct completion from Nvidia right now, and the price of just over £300 is a reasonable amount to pay for the fastest single GPU card currently on the market, especially when it packs DirectX 11 support too.

Asus though as further sweetened the deal with the HD 5870 Voltage Tweak, including a very nifty software addition that unlocks a great deal more performance for effectively free, as the Asus HD 5870 costs no more than any other of the competing offerings from AMD’s other board partners!

While the voltage tweaking capabilities of the Smart Doctor software are great though, the software itself is passable at best, and infuriatingly rubbish at worst. The inability to manually adjust clock speeds 1MHz at a time and the fact you can’t auto-apply overclocks at start up are dreadful mistakes, and the poor nature of the software takes a lot of the shine from the card’s unique selling point. Other board partners do overclocking applications so much better and Asus seriously needs to improve this aspect of its cards.

Nevertheless, the Asus HD 5870 Voltage Tweak is still a keenly priced example of the card, and a decent bundle and the unique addition of the voltage tweak ability makes it stand out from the crowd of competing HD 5870s. Until we start to see pre-overclocked or custom cooled examples of the HD 5870 (still realistically, a few months off), this is the card to get.

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• 9/10

• Features
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• 10/10

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• 7/10

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• 8/10

Score Guide