GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5870 (Cypress XT) GV-R587UD-1GD Video Card w/ Eyefinity

Comment:
At stock clocks at 100% load, the gpu doesn't exceed 70°C. It looks nice, and the cooler is easy to disassemble if you need to clean the heatsink of dust.

Comment:
This GPU works great with most games. I can run most games on max settings with 1920x1080 r 60hz. On some games I get some tearing and/or artifacts. Dual display works well most of the time. I have had issues with 2D apps, especially streaming online video, it works but I get flicker on my 2nd display sometimes (higher quality seems to be worse).It gets noisy while playing more demanding games but nothing that raising the volume knob on the sound system won't handle. Love it and for the price it's great.

Comment:
My comp is in very demanding setup. i5 750, this 5870, corsair atx psu all crammed in sg06. It has some heat issues but this case is not designed to hold such high performance components, so I'm not complaining much. However, when it heats up excessively, 5870 seems to be always the first to stop working. Fan noise is considerable especially in such a small case. Noise can be heard unless I turn up the speaker.Also noticed some high frequency noise when playing game intro for crysis, etc.

Comment:
I am a big fan of the Ultra Durable line of motherboard from Gigabyte so I decided to give their UD video card a try. I could list a bunch of advert jargons but ultimately what I look for is whether the unit is silent enough given its default performance. So far it is proving itself to be a church mouse in terms of noise production even during stress test. I didn't test the over-clockability of this card much. I got the unit up to a very modest 900MHz with a satisfactory temps/noise ratio and have yet to run into a blue screen during actual gaming. As for over-clocking the RAM, I dunno. The heatsink doesn't touch the RAMs at all. I am most likely going to leave it alone for now.