Gigabyte HD 5870 1GB Super Overclock Review

A Closer Look at the Gigabyte HD 5870 1GB SoC pg.2

The low-slung nature of the heatsink used on this card means Gigabyte couldn’t install ramsinks onto the GDDR5 memory modules. Granted, the actual benefit of ramsinks has yet to be proven but once again we would have preferred if Gigabyte had erred on the side of caution.


The back of the Super Overclock’s totally custom PCB holds a wealth of interesting design features that are unique to this card. To begin with, there are six green LEDs which light up in tune with the number of power phases in use once Gigabyte's OC Guru software is installed. There are also five black squares that look a lot like memory ICs but are actually Prodalizer film capacitors made by NEC’s subsidiary Tokin. This 4+1 setup (four capacitors for the core and one for the memory) is supposed to provide high switching frequency and current capacity with lower ESR which results in extremely clean power delivered to all of this card’s components. In addition, these “supercapactiors” can also eliminate the high pitched “whine” that characterizes some high-end graphics cards.


Gigabyte has decided to keep the reference card’s backplate which means it packs a pair of DVI connectors as well as outputs for both HDMI and DisplayPort.