Legit Video Card Reviews
ATI Radeon HD 5870 DX11 Video Card Review
| Manufacturer: | AMD |
| Product: | Radeon HD 5870 |
| Date: | Tue, Sep 22, 2009 - 11:00 PM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card is by far one of the most interesting products that we have had the chance to take a look at in 2009. The card appears to live up to the hype and is the real deal when it comes to performance on DirectX 9/10/10.1 game titles. We can only hope that it also performs just as well on DirectX 11 game titles as the Radeon 5800 series will be something that anyone upgrading to Windows 7 should be looking into.
When it comes to pricing the ATI Radeon HD 5870 will set you back $379.99, which is $80 more than what the ATI Radeon HD 4870 cost back in the summer of 2008 when it first launched. ATI didn't abandon the $299 price point, though, as the ATI Radeon HD 5850 will cost $259.99. At $120 less, it will be interesting to see how the ATI Radeon HD 5850 will perform. AMD told Legit Reviews that we can expect the first volume shipments of the Radeon HD 5870 to be available on shelf today with the Radeon HD 5850 cards being available the next week around September 28th. Both cards support full DirectX 11 compliance, ATI Eyefinity Technology and basically the same GPU core. The Radeon HD 5850 might just be the price versus performance winner, but since we don't have a sample of it yet we can't say with certainty that it will be.
Just by looking at the specifications it looks like it will be a strong part even though it has just 1440 stream processors operating at a core clock frequency of 725MHz. The only other major feature change is that the 1GB of GDDR5 memory is operating at 1000MHz rather than 1200MHz, so the memory bandwidth is lower. Chances are that the Radeon HD 5850 will be the part to have for overclockers looking for the biggest bang for the buck. The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is the same core, but from an architecture level it has just 18 SIMD engines (2 fewer than the Radeon HD 5870) that operate at lower clock frequencies. No matter which card interests you the most you can't go wrong with either one from the looks of it.
From a performance perspective the ATI Radeon HD 5870 blew away the Radeon HD 4890 and the GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards in the benchmarks that we ran on Windows 7. The Radeon HD 5870 is by far the fastest single GPU graphics card that we have ever benchmarked and it is the real deal. It doesn't have an annoyingly loud fan, suck down obsessive amounts of power or heat up your room while you aren't gaming. The user experience with this card is very well rounded and it is tough to find anything negative to say about it. The only downside to the card seems to be the length, which at over 11 inches it might be problematic to those that have mid-tower or small form factor systems.
In closing this is not the last that you have seen of the Radeon HD 5800 series here at Legit Reviews. For starters not one DirectX 11 game title has a demo out. That means we haven't been able to run any games in DirectX 11, which is one of the key features of this card. Also, due to a shipping mishap the DisplayPort enabled monitors that we ordered in didn't make it in time to be included in this launch article. We'll have a follow up story showing off ATI Eyefinity Technology and looking at all the cool uses you can do with a setup like one of these. We also hope to get our hands on the Radeon HD 5850 real soon, so we can bring you a look at a video card with a lower price point.
Legit Bottom Line: The ATI Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest single GPU graphics card that we have ever tested by any manufacturer and has some new features like Eyefinity that are icing on the cake!
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Page 1 - The World's First DX11 GPU
Page 2 - The Radeon HD 5870 Page 3 - Radeon HD 5870 With No HSF Page 4 - The Test System Page 5 - Batman: Arkham Asylum Page 6 - Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Page 7 - Need For Speed: Shift‎ Page 8 - Resident Evil 5 Page 9 - Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. Page 10 - 3DMark Vantage Page 11 - FurMark 1.7.0 Page 12 - Temperature Testing Page 13 - Power Consumption Page 14 - Overclocking Page 15 - Extreme Overclocking Page 16 - Bitstream Audio Testing Page 17 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
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