Manli 5870

Whoa. Man... trippy. Manli's latest video card is a tunnel of fun.

Manli got off to a funny start when we first saw their cards back in Issue 100; not especially bad, but covered with goofy robot mascots that gave the impression it was selling novelty pens as opposed to serious tech. They've revamped their image since then, and their 5870 is packed into a luxurious folding box that shows off the card pretty well, and certainly has the feeling of quality you'd expect. The card itself is an interesting design, with arbitrary black and white swirls that appear to tunnel inside the card's hard shell. However, looks aren't everything.

Performance here is what most people are really after, which this card can deliver quite admirably. While it is running a full complement of shader units at 1600 total, this is only a small amount over the 5850 (with 1440), and the clockspeed isn't a huge increase. As such we can see increases in Crysis performance as well as 3DMark Vantage (both being incredibly stressful on the GPU), but GRID and 3DMark06 don't show significant improvements at all. This is due to the slight difference in specs, but also due to the memory bandwidth available. 1GB of GDDR5 memory connects through a 256-bit memory bus here, but even this amount of bandwidth caused the core to become starved of data very noticeably in GRID; causing the occasional stutter where the keyboard kept inputting, but the game itself hadn't continued to move, resulting in oversteering.

Thankfully this limited bandwidth can be somewhat negated by overclocking the memory chips, though we could only increase them six per cent to 1275MHz, a disappointing result. The core seemed to also be limited in overclocking compared to other cards, hitting a nine per cent increase to 930MHz (a GIGABYTE 5870 last issue hit 950MHz). Perhaps not the best overclocking result, but it's still larger than what we recorded from ASUS - your mileage may vary.

What is nice about these high-end cards is that the core can clock itself down to only 157MHz, using very little power and therefore generating a negligible amount of heat. This translates to a fan that barely needs to spin to keep things cool, making only 50.2dBA. In Juggs' words from our forums, "as silent as a 15 year old listening out mid wank". This increases to a loud 62.2dBA at load, almost as loud as the same 15 year old after being discovered in the act. Temperatures are a little less raunchy, at 43 degrees idle and a hot 66 degrees at load.

Physically the card shares all the same outputs as most of the cards in ATI's 5xxx series, offering two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort connector. Twin Crossfire nipples allow up to four of these babies to work in tandem, and while it might seem like overkill (ok, it <i>is</i> overkill) it's more performance than you'll ever need for years to come. Two 6-pin PCIe power connectors provide the juice that keeps the card running, conveniently placed on the top edge of this very long card - check your case to see if this will fit, since it's so darn huge.

Included with the card is the usual bunch of extras like cables and a driver CD, but unfortunately there is no game anywhere to be found. While Manli certainly is amongst the cheapest offerings of cards in the country, most of them throw in a copy of DiRT 2 (worth a hundred bucks), making this seem a missed opportunity that wouldn't have increased costs by a significant amount. A good choice, if otherwise limited.