ASUSTeK COMPUTER ATI Radeon HD 5870 1 GB EAH5870/G/2DIS/1GD5

Calling this an amazing card would be an insult and understatement. This single GPU graphics card beats out just about every video card on the market today aside for the HD 5970 which is a dual GPU video card. Once you place the HD 5870 in a 2 GPU crossfire configuration it even surpasses the HD 5970, and once you add in a third... well lets just say its impossible to touch.

The card runs great, uses a lot less power than cards before it which also means less heat. Less heat of course means you get a much longer life out of your card. The only problem one might have is the stock cooler can get a bit loud when running at higher speeds. To remedy this one can either use water cooling or the Arctic Cooling Twin Turbo Pro or the Scythe MUSASHI Twin-Fan VGA Cooler. All of these are aftermarket coolers which will have to be purchased separately.

When it comes to performance ingame get ready for maxed out everything, yes even with Crysis on 1920 x 1080 at 8xAA and everything set to max you pull about 45 FPS with a single HD 5870. This card will bring your gaming experience to a whole new level especially when the DX11 games start to roll out in 2010. Get ready for much more graphical detail which cannot be matched by anything on the market from nVidia today.

If you are really looking for a new experience the new 5000 series cards from ATI also have a new technology called Eyefinity which allows for the use of three monitors running off a single card in 5760 x 2400 resolution. Yes you read that correctly THREE monitors off a single card and yes the resolution is also correct. The Eyefinity technology is not just available on he HD 5850 and HD 5870 but also the HD 5750 and 5770 although you might have slightly lower resolution it still delivers unprecedented performance.

When it comes to overclocking your graphics card ATI provides a wonderful overclocking utility that comes right along with the card allowing you to squeeze extra performance and frame rates out of your current card. Since overclocking can lead to some unstable systems the ATI overclocking utility has a nice feature which lets the software find a decent overclock for you. No messing around with different settings and risking the destruction of your warranty and video card.

So if you are looking to make an investment not just in your gaming experience today but also in your gaming experience for the future an HD 5870 graphics card, especially once from Asus who is synonymous with quality products and support, is something worth every penny.