I had been playing Grand Theft Auto IV on my new Dell Inspiron 15R N5010 for last 2 days and I have so much to say that I wonder if I would be able to keep you interested or not! Oh well! I will try my best anyway!
Installation
Rainbow 6 Vegas 2
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go60-5euYA8[/youtube]
GTA IV
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9DZNIqV9as[/youtube]
Mass Effect 2
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLhGBZbThb4[/youtube]
Dirt 2
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0cHlZieU5M[/youtube]
I am truely grateful to pwnoobhax and matze2506, who took their time and benchmarked this graphics card. You must join their channels for more great benchmarking videos.
It’s definitely a matter of choice as well as need, because Dell has served us a great range of laptops which have great performance in both gaming field and normal work.
ATI HD 5870 is packed with several features as we already know. The main problem which end-users are facing right now is lack of driver support.
Eyefinity Technology is still not usable for some users:
HD 5870 featured Eyefinity technology but some users have complained that Eyefinity cannot be used until they (ATI) release the driver support it. The main problem is, ATI is not going to release the driver for a month or two as I write this.
Right now, at ati.amd.com website, driver version 9.10 can be seen which was posted way back on 10/22/2009. Hence, it is clearly visible that ATI has not yet released Eyefinity support version.
Crysis game – Walls have white dots and game crashes with black screen:
Another problem that gamers are experiencing is with Crysis game (not Crysis: Warhead) accompanied with Windows Seven 64-bit as OS. I have heard a lot that Crysis and such games are basically optimized for Nvidia because Nvidia pays them a handsome amount of money to put their tag along with the game.
That might be true, but it is also true that ATI still lacks a proper driver support from the very launch of HD 5870. But there is nothing to worry about it just yet, because it’s been only a couple of months and latest drivers will be released soon.
If you are curious about what sort of problems Crysis fans are facing then read this paragraph or skip this one. While playing the game, they experienced some white dots or freckles on the walls when they looked from a close range. Since rest of the game and environment became extremely alive, gamers couldn’t resist but to get annoyed by those white dots. Some gamers also learned to figure out a way to smoothen it to an extent that it won’t bother them.
Click here to read the post by Xerose at www.rage3d.com on how to remove (smoothen) those white dots.
No problems with Crysis – Warhead for now:
Crysis: Warhead is working fine though and as I said, everything has become much more alive than it was with other cards. Though Crysis: Warhead is also one of those games which don’t support DX11, but still, it seems that a DX11 graphics card has made significant improvement in these, open world, games.
Driver version is still 9.10 as posted on 10/22/2009 at ati.amd.com:
Now, I would like to tell you that end-users are still using driver version 9.10. So if you have built a new rig with HD 5870 and nice display, and you are facing some problems regarding black screen, occasional crashes and graphics driver shutdown issues, then don’t panic and please don’t start blaming the card.
Be patient and wait for the latest driver to come out, it will fix a lot of your problems and if you have got some extra displays around the corner of your house (maximum three for now!) then you might be able to use them then. Eyefinity is a kind of revolutionary technology which allows us to enlarge our work area whenever we need it.
No overheating and loud noise yet:
That’s right, while I am writing the problems in this article; it is fair enough that I write some plus points too.
Idle state power consumption is way too low to believe and that’s quite beneficial for those who want to conserve as much as power while not gaming and just doing some ordinary computing.
HD 5870 is not a very cool card but it does benefit more in respect to other cards with a sufficient cooling and you don’t have to go for drastic cooling solutions you chose not to.
That’s some small information for now. I’ll tell you what comes up with ATI’s latest drivers when they are posted on AMD’s website and we’ll see if we can use HD 5870’s Eyefinity without any troubles or not.
