As usual with AMD boards, one month after the debut of the product, first custom products start to trickle out. We have seen first images of Sapphire's Vapor-X card, but PowerColor went one step further and partnered with famous Slovenian manufacturer EkWaterBlocks to release the coolest 5870 on the market.
By using the EK-5870-Acetal version, PowerColor optimized the video BIOS and overclocked the card to 875 MHz for the core and 1250 MHz for the GDDR memory [5 GT/s], resulting in nice increase of computing performance and memory bandwidth - LCS HD5870 ups the computing power from 2.72 to 2.8 TFLOPS, but the memory is now 160 GB/s. There is a lot of headroom to go from these clocks, given the massive decrease in operating temperatures.
While we don't want to estimate until we receive the product for a review, we were told that the GPU temperature will go down by 30-35%. Probably the most important part on the 5870 PCB is the Digital PWM [Pulse Width Modulation] voltage regulators and EK-5870-Acetal covers these heated parts as well.
On the plus side, DiRT 2 is also bundled with this product, just like majority of 5870 boards out there. Given that Codemasters pushed the release from December 9th to December 1st, only four weeks remain until the first AAA DirectX 11 title arrives on market - and those coupons become valid codes on Steam.
The board will arrive on market with the second batch of Radeon HD 5870 boards, during next week. PowerColor should have the products in stock by November 6th. Until then, you can continue clicking on auto-notify on e-tailers around the globe, but there won't be any boards available.
UPDATE October 29th, 2009 16:05 GMT - We learned the retail price. According to Andre Santos, PR and Marketing manager in TuL Corporation [parent company for PowerColor] the recommended retail price is Euro 429.99 in EMEA region, and around 449 USD in North America. The price difference exists due to radical difference in VAT [Value Added Tax] between Europe and North America.
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