Now, the first graphics card manufacturers started to announce overclocked graphics cards based on AMD's Radeon HD 5870 GPU. At the beginning of the month, we could detect the manufacturer ASUS was planning to launch overclocked models of its Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 cards. But the XFX Black Edition series was not first on the market, both of both Sapphire and PowerColor announce overclocked models of the Radeon 5870 Sapphire water-cooled LCS HD5870 cards, we have already talked about but also PowerColor has now followed the trend. The industry's fastest single-GPU graphics card has, in other words become even faster, but it is more academic differences in clock speed of AMD's reference design. We had hoped for frequencies in all cases north of 900MHz, but unfortunately none of the manufacturers directly close.

Both have chosen proprietary cooling for their card which then PowerColor focusing on proper water cooling while the Sapphire uses his well-known Vapor-X air cooling.

Sapphire has the finer specifications and a more powerful cooling, but also costs almost 700 additional SEK, 4400 SEC v Vapor-X 3700 crowns. At the same time, AMD will unleash its Radeon HD 5970 in just one days so the bar is being raised further.