Gigabyte HD 5870 1GB Super Overclock Review

A Closer Look at the Gigabyte HD 5870 1GB Super Overclock

Gigabyte’s HD 5870 Super Overclock card is simply dominated by a high performance, dual fan heatsink which is supposed to keep the overclocked core as cool as possible. Unfortunately, this design also leads to the vast majority of heat staying within the immediate vicinity of the card instead of being exhausted outside of your case.

Even though these pictures above make the card look extremely long, it actually sticks to the ATI reference length of 10 ½” for the PCB. However, due to the fact that Gigabyte has used a bare PCB instead of a heatsink shroud that overhands the edge of the PCB, the Super Overclock will take up about 1/2" less room in your case.


In the past, SoC series cards used the reference heatsink but Gigabyte decided to take a fundamentally different approach this time around. In the reference heatsink’s place is a massive dual fan affair that is obviously bred for performance with a quartet of large copper heatpipes to whisk heat away from the core and an aluminum fin array that is capped with a unique shroud. The two 80mm fans are slightly angled in order to direct their airflow with greater force through the fins but this could also cause slightly erratic airflow as well. We will see how this setup performs a bit later on in the review.


On the very back edge of the card are a number of multimeter read points which can be used to monitor everything from the memory and core voltage to the voltage of the card’s PCI-E interface. Even though most users won’t use these points, they will definitely come in handy for overclockers who push their cards beyond normal boundies.

Interestingly, Gigabyte decided to go with a pair of 6-pin PCI-E connectors instead of the 6+8 setup most of ATI’s board partners are using for their overclocked HD 5870 cards. Whether or not this layout will hamper the SoC’s upper end overclocking limits is anyone’s guess but we would much rather have the overhead granted by the 6+8 combination than go without it when overclocking.