ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 2GB DirectX 11 Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,047 words · ~5 min read
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so today I'll be doing an unboxing or rather an unbagging of a product that is
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available at retail but not in this particular form so this is the okay you
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know what I'm not going to tell you what it is and oh hold on I need to get my
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knife here because uh you know this knife has proven very popular with my
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viewers I'm going to break the elastic there yeah there we go we'll use that as
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a size size comparison against the uh the video card so based on the accessory
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the one accessory that came with this sample card I'm going to let our viewers
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guess so pause the video and see if you can guess what card this is so it
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includes six mini DisplayPort to
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DisplayPort adapters okay so go ahead
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pause the video put down a comment and guess anyway so for those who guessed or
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for those who haven't guessed yes this is the ATI Radeon
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hd5870 ifinity 6 Edition so this this has six
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display outputs and other than that it
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is pretty much a plain Radeon 5870 but a
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couple of things first of all because it has six mini display ports and you can
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actually plug them in just like that okay it also has a fulllength exhaust
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slot unlike the regular 5870 which is only able to exhaust off about a quarter
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of the PCI back plate now another advantage that it has is that it has 2
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gigs of video RAM versus the only 1 gig
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of video RAM on the regular 5870 other
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than that it's pretty similar so you can see we've got our back plate here and
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we've got a full shroud on the back that's cooling um that's cooling the
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back of the video card we've got a regular PCI Express 16x interface up at
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the top we will find two Crossfire Bridge uh fingers but you know what this
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is something that there's a lot of misconceptions about and I thought I'd just clear this up a lot of people think
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you have to to plug two Bridges if you've only got two cards but actually
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that can degrade performance rather than helping performance it's actually just
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fine to run only a single bridge between your two cards so there you go Crossfire
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lesson of the day so around the front of the card we find the ATI Radeon branding
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and here's another big difference is that this card uses a six pin and an 8
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Pin PCI Express power connector so because it's got those uh that extra RAM
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that's the only real spec difference and it needs a little bit more power
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okay so we'll go around to the Batmobile esque shape of the cooler because this
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is a sample card and not actually a retail card there's only the ATI
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branding on it so there's no uh no partner branding like a sapphire
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powercolor XFX nothing like that around
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the bottom of the card we find nothing all that exceptional now I just want to
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talk a little bit about the infinity 6 card and the technology that goes behind
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it so you can see that has gone and included six mini DisplayPort to
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DisplayPort adapters and while I'm talking I'm just going to plug these in
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so that you can get the full impact of all the displays you can hook up to this
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card I mean even a couple years ago the idea of having a consumer level gaming
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card that could output three displays was crazy and now we have one that can
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output to six displays now you you might
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go oh well I don't have a DisplayPort Monitor and that may be true but the
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reality is once you've gone out to DisplayPort you can actually take two
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of these and you can adapt them to either HDMI or DVI so you could run six
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monitors off of this card with two DVI
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adapters and then four DisplayPort monitors so that would give you a way to
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do that now iin 6 you can make the argument again that a 5870 isn't really
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powerful enough to drive six displays at 2560 x600 resolution that would probably
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be true but what you can do is you can still run six displays out in crossfire
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mode with another ifinity 6 Edition card so that means that you can actually run
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six displays off two cards and get the power of both cards running behind it I
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don't believe it this time you can Crossfire a 5870 ifinity 6 with a
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regular 5870 and the reason for that is the different video memory although they
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may update that in the future so thank you for checking out my unboxing and
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quick product Showcase of the ATI radio ion 5870 ifinity
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6 yeah the cameraman reminded me when I said thank you for watching my video
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blog or whatever it is I said that uh I never actually did the size comparison
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that I promised so here it is plugged into a really old fail motherboard but
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it is a standard ATX board so you can see that it does stretch about an inch
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past the edge of the board okay so you can kind of look at that from the bottom
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see how far it stretches out you can see what it looks like installed in the
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motherboard so it takes up both the PCI Express slot it's plugged into as well
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as the next over slot and then here it
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is for size comparison against the cameraman's iPhone because we so
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frequently do that you can see that it is much smaller than an or much smaller
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much bigger than an iPhone there you go as helpful as that may be and then last
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but not least comparison is against the length of the sword that I have begun
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using for my unboxings so there that is it that is the scale of the iin 6 5870 2
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gig graphics card