We’ve never been major advocates of GPU overclocking, as the minor gains you achieve often don’t justify the added heat and instability. But there’s a clear difference between Billy Joe doing a maximum overclock on his GPU and a vendor overclocking the part at the factory.
So when XFX offered up its XXX Edition of the already-fast Radeon HD 5870, we were naturally curious. XFX pushes the HD 5870 to 875MHz (3 percent over the stock 850MHz) and juices the memory to 1,300MHz (8.3 percent over the stock 1,200MHz). At first blush, a 3 percent core overclock seems minimal. Given that the card costs about $430, versus about $405 for the stock XFX variant, is it worth the extra jingle?
Is an overclocked GPU worth the extra ducats?
To find out, we compared the performance of the XXX Edition to a standard XFX Radeon HD 5870, which is a stock card in every respect. Save for clock speeds, the two cards are identical: memory (1GB), ports (two DVI, one DisplayPort, one HDMI), and the reference cooling system. Because of the speed bumps to the XXX Edition’s core and memory clocks, its system idle power usage varies from the stock card, reaching 148W versus 141W.
Our tests were run on a Core i7-975 Extreme Edition with 6GB of DDR3/1333 and 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. The PSU is a Corsair TX850W 850W unit. We ran the benchmarks at 1920x1200, eye candy maxed out, with and without 4x AA enabled. The scores look pretty much as we expected, given the slight core and more substantial memory clock boost.
Yes, the XFX Radeon HD 5870 XXX Edition wins in all of the game benchmarks, but the margins, while consistent, are so small as to be almost meaningless. It is the first time we’ve seen a single videocard score greater than 100fps in Far Cry 2 at 1920x1200 (with AA disabled). On average, the XXX Edition yields a 4 percent gain in performance for a 6 percent increase in price.
For consumers who are worried about the long-term impact of an overclocked card, XFX’s warranty might reassure you. It’s simply the best in the business at five years, with the ability to transfer the warranty once, should the original owner resell the card. The card is definitely fast, and if you have to have the fastest GPU on the block, you may find the uptick worth it. But the standard card is a better deal in the end—almost as fast, more power-efficient, and lower-priced.
Fastest single-GPU card we've tested; XFX warranty.
Pricier than stock cards; higher idle power usage; stock cards are plenty fast.
| Radeon HD 5870 XXX | Radeon HD 5870 | |
|---|---|---|
| 3DMark Vantage Extreme | 9,181 | 8,312 |
| Battle Forge / AA on (fps) | 33 | 31 |
| Far Cry 2 / Action, AA on (fps) | 64 | 63 |
| Far Cry 2 / Ranch Long, AA on (fps) | 75 | 72 |
| HAWX / AA on (fps) | 84 | 81 |
| S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP / AA, tess on (fps) | 42 | 39 |
| Crysis / AA on (fps) | 32 | 32 |
Best scores are bolded. Our test system uses a 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition in an Asus Rampage II Extreme X58 motherboard, 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, a Corsair TX850 PSU, a Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme cooler, a 1TB Seagate 7200.12 hard drive, and 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. All test runs were performed at 1920x1200.
Cruzg10
April 26, 2010 at 6:36pm
thats not much of a gain for the amount of $ you have to pony up extra. meh, ill pass
GuavaSauce
April 26, 2010 at 4:58pm
i have 2 of these, but currently only using one. pushing BFBC2 out of the box at 1920x1200 maxed settings, 4aa 16af with 63fps average. with 900 core clock, it hits 80'sfps average. awsome card. need to test the scaling in CF though.(wife is using other card, old one went out)
Danthrax66
April 26, 2010 at 4:49pm
Doesn't sapphire have a Toxic edition clocked at 925 or 950 plus 2gb of ram? And why would you even go with this when the vapor-x is the same price and has one hell of a cooler on it.
Julyjules
April 26, 2010 at 3:39pm
How does it compare to NVIDIA's GTX 480? Wasn't Fermi supposed to be the fastest GPU?
gendoikari1
April 26, 2010 at 3:48pm
Raw performance, yes, but heat, price, power and availability go to the 5870.
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