Digital Home Thoughts: The Radeon 5870 is a Pretty Fast Video Card

"Two years ago, AMD’s ATI division decided to bow out of the game of building huge, hot chips that were expensive to make, ceding the high-end glory to Nvidia’s GT200 chip. That’s not to say AMD gave up on performance; it instead adopted the mantra of building the best performance GPU within a certain cost and power envelope. The Radeon HD 5800 series, originally code-named RV870, is the culmination of that approach."

If you're looking for some serious pixel pushing power, the newly released Radeon 5870 should be close to the top of your list. While some dual GPU configurations still sit on top, it seems as if ATI is starting to follow the trend that CPUs took 4-5 years ago. Instead of going the faster, hotter, hungrier route, requiring a nuclear reactor and wind tunnel to maintain, lean and mean is what's hot. The 5870 admittedly will gulp down a hefty 188 watts of power (Still less than the GTX 295s 289 watts!) when in full use, when idle, it putters along at a mere 27 watts. I am just glad that they are going this route. Performance is still important, but there are a lot of other factors coming into consideration, like power usage, noise, number of displays and physical size. The 5870 is definitely an ehtusiast card, but its legacy, as shown in the less models, will benefit us all.