Gigabyte HD 5870 1GB Super Overclock Review

Core Temperature & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


Gigabyte claims the Super Overclock card achieves great temperatures and we have to agree with them on this one. The only card that was able to best it was XFX’s custom cooled HD 5830 which should say a lot about Gigabyte’s high-end cooling solution. Acoustics was a bit touch and go in our books but subjectively this card was slightly louder than a reference card but not to the point of being audible over normal case fan noise.

System Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


We ran and reran the power consumption tests again and again but every time the same results reared their ugly heads. We’re not sure if our card somehow has one of those mythical high leakage chips or if Gigabyte’s component choices were made for performance rather than efficiency but these are some ugly numbers. After fiddling with the Gigabyte OC Guru software in the “Saving” mode (more on that in the next section) but that didn’t stop it from setting record-breaking –for a HD 5870- consumption numbers.