Introduction

For a while we saw a flurry of new NVIDIA cards while ATI kind of sat stagnant. That's stopped now with the release of the new HD 5800 series from the red team. Over the next few months we're going to see plenty of the HD 5870 we have with us today, along with the lower HD 5850 and the higher HD 5870 X2.

Not only that, though, we're going to see companies like Sapphire, HIS, GIGABYTE, ASUS and more put their own spin on it, be it an Atomic or Toxic model or Turbo and TOP ones. What we think the HD 5800 series is capable of today is going to be proven wrong with companies giving us even more performance than the stock clocked model we'll be looking at here first up.

The first HD 5870 out of the TweakTown gates comes from Sapphire, one of only a few AMD-only partners. It's more important for companies who rely on AMD producing a good core so they can continue to stay afloat by making profits from their own versions of the card.

Today will be no different than any other review when it comes to the overall layout. First we'll have a look at the box and what's inside before having a closer look at the card and the specifications. Being a new card, we'll pay a bit more attention to the specifications in this case and move away from just looking at the core and memory clocks. If you manage to read all that then you'll be greeted with our benchmark line-up. There we'll see how the card performs compared to others from both the red and green team. Once everything is said and done we'll wrap it all up with our final thoughts, so with that said let's get stuck into the package and see what Sapphire are offering us today.