Radeon HD 5870 Gloriously Abused By Asus, Made Super Overclocking-Friendly [Guts]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/DzlsNCb3OEU/radeon-hd-5870-gloriously-abused-by-asus-made-super-overclocking+friendly

The Radeon HD 5870, as shipped, is a very powerful graphics card—more than most people need, even, and at the very least, enough for anyone. Except, apparently, Asus.

Asus' plans for their newest Republic of Gamers (ROG) Radeon HD 5870-based card cater to a specific breed—the overclock-everything-for-the-sake-of-it PC tweakers, who are dwindling along with their gaming platform—but really, anyone can appreciate them: by default, the card's GPU is cranked from 850 to 900MHz, and doubles the RAM to RAM to 2GB of DDR5 memory.

If that's not enough, you can dial your frequencies up using included overclocking software, which saves new settings directly to the card. And if you start to notice that delicious, telltale smell of melting silicon, you don't even have to navigate software to fix things: mashing a physical button on the back of the card reverts it to stock settings. Brilliant.

The ROG 5870 doesn't have a price or North America release date yet, but word is it's already hitting the streets in China, so full release details shouldn't be far off. [Zol via Techreport via SlashGear]