GIGABYTE 5870 SOC

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Oh wait, no, it's actually GIGABYTE's latest factory overclocked video card offering.

It's very easy to do an enthusiast card poorly. Sure, you can slap on an aftermarket heatsink, bump the clocks by 15MHz and call it done, but for something to really be special it needs a little more thought - and a lot more oomph. GIGABYTE reckons that its 5870 SOC, or Super OverClock edition, has more than enough oomph to move mountains. Can it? First looks are certainly deceiving.

The SOC boasts the traditional blue colour that GIGABYTE apply to every PCB it manufacture,s noteworthy for also featuring its two-ounce copper design that theoretically aids stability. It retains the dual-slot form factor, but rather than the reference heatsink the SOC is cooled by a custom design, described as an "Anti-turbulence Inclined Dual Fan". You'd imagine that this would translate into low noise, but the two fans made a constant racket of 68.9dBA at idle, and a slightly-louder - but no less intrusive - 69.1dBA at load. Perhaps there's no turbulence there, but it sure makes a buttload of noise; thankfully temperatures aren't too bad, ranging from 33 to 63 degrees Celsius.

It's only when we look harder that we start to see why this premium card has such a large price tag: there are no heatsinks on the memory chips (as overclockers are wont to remove them anyway); the power delivery system relies on NEC Proadlizer chips (relatively insane high-grade capacitors), the PCB is custom-designed (to allow for software core voltage control and hard voltage measurement points), and the core has been cherry-picked by GIGABYTE for extra-special specialness.

All these separate components mesh together to create a card that comes out of the factory with a 100MHz overclock on the core to begin with, sitting at 950MHz guaranteed. On top of that increase, it also has an extra 50MHz bumped on to the memory clocks, which boosts the stock performance of this card markedly. It garners an extra 2-odd frames per second in Crysis, a nice speed boost in GRID, an extra thousand 3DMarks and a score of 43 in Unigine. Not exactly earthshattering, but it's nice to have something more.

Unfortunately, this is where the appeal of the SOC starts to become a little muddied. Considering that the core is already overclocked, we could only bump it up a further six per cent on air cooling to 1010MHz (+60). This is still impressive clocks, don't get us wrong, but it's not significantly higher on air than a reference 5870 can hit. So too does the memory not increase markedly, with only a small four per cent increase.

This leaves the SOC in a funny place - it costs more than a standard 5870, and only offers marginal overclocking capabilities on air. And here's the clincher: this card was never really intended to be only run under the stock heatsink. Even watercooling may prove to be insufficient cooling for the card. In effect it's like stuffing a fully-grown silverback gorilla into a tuxedo - awkward for all concerned, and has to be done quickly before your arms are ripped off. This makes the SOC a little too limiting, and quite a bit insane for the average Atomican.

For those who are perhaps too afraid (or time-poor) to overclock, this is a nice little bump. For everyone else, it's a brilliant example of an over-engineered product that just isn't practical.