While graphics card overclocking is all well and good there’s that tweaking option most enthusiasts are familiar with when it comes to pushing a CPU and that’s control over voltages, without that control your hopes of hitting high speed levels are quite low indeed.

Asus has worked magic on their new EAH5870 (Radeon HD 5870 if you hadn’t guessed) graphics card which opens up new options that let you delve into higher voltages without messy volt-mods or firmware flashing of the past. HardOCP has the review:

The ASUS EAH5870 is ASUS’s first model video card released that is based on the new ATI Radeon HD 5870. That being the case, this is basically a “reference” video card: the GPU is clocked at 850MHz, the memory at 4.2GHz, and it uses the reference dual slot cooling solution. The EAH5870’s one notable distinction from this bland reference crowd is ASUS’s Voltage Tweak, which allows you to set the Vcore by using the supplied SmartDoctor utility. This gives the ASUS EAH5870 an advantage over other similar Radeon HD 5870 based video cards and should provide greater room for overclocking potential, thus better performance for hardware enthusiasts.

It’s good for a decent boost in frame rates over a “normal” overclock but you’re going to want a beefier power supply to handle the extra power draw when running higher voltages.

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The graphics battle kicks into high gear again with today’s launch of AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. Of course you can expect the usual performance improvements but the chip also sports new power saving features that should tame it when it’s just sitting around idling.

Here’s a collection of links testing the new board:

AMD’s Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs – AnandTech
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Review – bit-tech
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review – HardOCP
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One – Hot Hardware
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Graphics Card and AMD Eyefinity Review – PC Perspective
AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 graphics processor – The Tech Report

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