There’s something to be said about custom cooling configurations. The base models most chip manufacturers ship with their creations do the minimum amount of work with the maximum amount of noise output imaginable.

MSI’s HD 5870 Lightning graphics card does away with the reference cooler in favor of a dual fan design that looks more than up to the task of cooling the Radeon HD 5870 it houses. techPowerUp has the review:

When looking at the PCB design, it becomes clear that MSI has gone long ways to improve the AMD reference design for extra overclocking potential. The included SSC coils work without emitting any coil noise, and the added number of PWM phases will help in situations that require large amounts of power fed to the GPU. But it seems to me that during normal use and during overclocking with the stock cooler, these features seem to make little difference.

A performance tailored card with plenty of features enthusiasts are looking for and a hefty amount of cooling performance.

The bulk of the graphics cards that are released with a GPU launch tend to stick near the factory settings because most manufacturers are in a rush to get their products to market quicker, the more interesting stuff comes along later.

The XFX Radeon HD 5870 XXX Edition serves up a bit of a clock speed bump which will power it past its stock clocked brothers. Motherboards.org has the review:

The XFX version of the HD 5870 card has a clock speed of 875MHz, which is 25MHz faster than the HD 5870 reference design. Their XT version has a clock speed of 865MHz which is a small decrease from this card. XFX has overclocked the memory by 100MHz over the reference clock as well. The memory on the card is GDDR5 memory which doubles the bandwidth of that found on GDDR3 memory. This translates into a memory data rate of 5.2Gbps and a memory bandwidth of 166.4GB/second.

It’s a speedier solution for those that can’t be bothered to do their own tweaking.

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.

Gaming has come a long way graphics-wise but there’s still quite a ways to go when it comes to the details that would make them truly immersive. One of those somewhat under-represented features is physics modeling which would improve realism but has so far been splintered into camps.

AMD has joined up with Pixelux Entertainment in order to develop an open source alternative physics engine that should be able to run on any OpenCL or DirectX 11 DirectCompute capable graphics card or hardware.

Interesting approach but, then again, there are only so many graphics chip makers and Intel, with Havok, and Nvidia, with PhysX, have already staked their claim.

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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