ATI 5870 - The Beast has arrived

That's a video card? It's the size of a hard drive!

I envy you I've been asking my girl if I can get one. She's like..."You spend enough time on that damn computer and money. You're going to have to save for it." I want one soo bad...

Either you have some really tiny feet, or that thing is a behemoth! I'd think the strain on the pci-e slot would be too great and you would need to lay your tower on its side

Mike

Judging by the KB for size comparison it looks like it's a little shorter than my GTX260(although beefier looking overall). Definately a good thing as I have a full tower and my card still sticks up under my HDs by an inch or more. Wish they'd work at least a little on reducing the size of Gfx cards. The things are getting monstrous. Looking forward to seeing the benches on it and don't forget to include the rest of your Specs.

Quite a bit larger, actually.

So then does that card take two slots?  Looks like it does. 

What kind of connections does it have? 

How many monitors does it allow you to hook up?

Sheesh...it have it's own power station supplying it? Need special coolant?

I see no GPU in that pic...is it under that surf board i see on the desk?...:P

You can hook up to 6 monitors to it.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/ati_radeon_5870_fastest_videocard_ever_ps_its_380?page=0%2C0

I have 2x 5850 and it has 3 video-outs and takes up two slots. The 5870 is just two 5850s on the same GPU board.

Do you have to beef up the power supply to run it?

No actually the 5870 is a single GPU card.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870_17.html#sect0

The 5970 is a dual GPU card

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5970_15.html#sect0

And I would love to have one but I think for the price I'll stick with my 2 4890s in CrossfireX.

I'm jealous.....although thanks to the 5800s coming out when I built my last machine I got my XFX 4870 1GB for next to nothing. So bring on the 6800s so I can upgrade!

It's called 'perspective', Mike.... JAFOCHECK

the 5870 is SWEET!!!! i currently have 2 sapphire vapor-x 4890's in a crossfire configuration. i'm thinking of selling them and getting  2 saphire vapor-x 5770 cards. that'll save me a bit of dough over the 5870. congrats on the new card, id.

I had to change my power supply and since it is so long, i had to remove the internal bottom half HD bay casing to have it fit on the Motherboard (and move the HDs in the CD bay).  But it was worth it! 

Dude.

Two 5870s.

Yield practically no performance increase.

But grats, its a great card. The crossfire drivers are kinda buggy for some things though.

Why are people so impressed?  Video cards have been super huge for about 5 years now.

My 5750, 5770, x1900xt 512, 8800 gts 640, gtx 260 and upcoming 5970 all are super huge.

If anything, the ati 5xxx series is SMALL compared to how large the gtx 280 and 295 were!  The gtx 260 goes thru the middle fan area of my antec 900.

My graphics card is the size of a small sticky note and it can run any game in low settings and most games with high settings.

Spence...it seems you get alot of new tech...are you lucky enough to get cards for testing purposes or do you have to buy these out of your pocket?

I just wish ATI would get the single-slot succesor to the 4850 out. The 4850 is a wonderful card; powerful enough to run almost everything and it doesn't need a beast of a power supply. The 5850 is a dual-slot monster. I just need a single-slot card that can run on a 360 Watt power supply.

I bought a 5750 ... what they don't tell you is that you need to have an active display port adapter if you plan on doing a triple screen configuration.  It's taken me a lot of frustration to find this out.  Ugh.  But still a rockin card. 

The 4850 is good, but I've found that you really have to keep the vents free of dust when you run games like Crysis. Otherwise it overheats itself.

Those two slot cards look nice, but some modem thing that I don't use takes up the output slot right below the slot that my 4850 uses, so if I upgrade I'll have to tinker around with that. Nice design idea, Gateway...

I used to run 4870's but always seemed to have little problems here and there, made the switch to EVGA GTX 295 a while back, and love it, have not had any problems whatsoever,i might be that i am jinxed with ATI, even my ATI tv tuner didnt work properly, but this 295 while a little steep in price, the performance is spectacular, especially when i am working on digital pictures and videos

You can only connect 3 monitors at any given time to this card.  There is an upcoming version that will support Eyefinity6 for 6 monitors at once.