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Box and bundle
The Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X comes in a suitably arctic-themed box. Penguins and ice abound.
The bundle features this time around not one, but a coupon and DVD for two games: Dirt 2 and Battlestations Pacific. While we can't say we played both (Dirt 2 does't come out until December by the way), we can say that getting a new racing game and a new WW2 RTS game is great. Besides the games, you also get a driver CD, a Crossfire bridge, a DVI-VGA adapter, two molex-to-PCIE adapters, and a manual.
Overclocking
From prior experience seeing the Vapor-X in action, we suspected it would be well up to the task of handling a little bit of overclocking. We had no problems max'ing out the core clock speed in the Catalyst Control Center. Unfortunately that max-out is only 30 MHz above the slight factory overclock that the Vapor-X comes with. We'll have to wait until some overclocking tools come out so we can really push the Vapor-X all that much further to see what it can do. As for the memory, we stopped the clocks at 1290 MHz -- so in the end we ended up with 900 / 1290 MHz for our overclocked clocks.
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You're correct that using a wider interface costs more, partly because of the number of traces to the GPU. It's also difficult to connect so many traces for a wide interface to the smallest GPUs. AMD/ATI seem happy to stick with 256bit on their high end, and get sufficient bandwidth by using the fastest DDR5 (effectively twice the clock speed of GDDR3).
I'm not talking about the GPU RAM memory, I'm talking about "Interface Memory". It's in the 'bits' size range.
The 5870 has plenty of memory bandwidth for a single GPU, and 1GB handles most games at 2560x1600. Of course, 2GB models will follow in time, as will an X2 (2GPU) version.
That's the next gen boost for you TBH.
The problem with gaming benchmarks, especially comparing old and new gen, is that it doesn't take into account how much of an improvement it would bring, visually, it just goes by pure performance. THe 5870 is no slouch in the FPS category (usually beating everything but the 295), but the improvements, visually, are not taken into account in those tests.
BTW: Is it just me, or shouldn't the NEW generation of cards have more interface memory than the old? the BFG 295 has way more than any of the others? Granted, I don't really know what it's for, but it strikes me that if an older gen card can have so much, why can't a new one? More is better, I'd think, unless it provides no noticable benefit and increases the cost...