14 DAY TRIAL // Companies have been supplying the graphics market segment with a steady flow of DirectX 11-capable cards from the ATI Radeon 5xxx series. Even in such conditions, market rumors and reports seem to indicate that hardware makers are, as always, working on more products than they care to say. One of the more recent occurrences was the emergence of photos that showed two graphics cards ASUS is reportedly working on. Dubbed the HD 5870 TOP and HD 5850 DirectCu, the two adapters are expected to have higher clocks and better cooling than the stock models.
These two graphics adapters are not the only models set to come from the company. ASUS has already been revealed to be preparing an extra HD 5870 card, with a memory of no less than 2GB GDDR5, a GPU clock of 900MHz and an interface of 256 bits. However, while the rumors dealing with this Republic of Gamers Matrix HD 5870 were more generous when it came to specs, the same cannot be said here. All that is more or less known of the HD 5870 TOP and HD 5850 DirectCu is what reasonable speculation can point towards.
The HD 5870 and HD 5850 models are expected to carry the EAH5870-TOP and EAH5850 DirectCu names, respectively. The EAH5870-TOP is likely to be factory overclocked (with heat managed by a higher-performance cooler) and the EAH5850 DirectCu is believed to be capable of running 35% more quietly and 20% cooler than the reference model, as it uses a more function-centric cooler design.
Unfortunately, there is no information on the actual clock frequencies or memory capacities of the products, although the official launch should not be too far off. Most speculation seems to lean towards a rather high possibility of the two graphics adapters making their appearance during CeBIT 2010.
