Ati radeon hd 5870 - Ati News!

Once the heatsink is removed, we can get directly to the GPU: The whole heatsink is fixed to the PCB with only four screws, and there’s also a smaller heatsink that takes care of cooling the power circuits.

The eight memory cheaps feature 128MB each and are placed only on the top part of the PCB, around the GPU; in that way, the 1025 MB available on the Sapphire solution can fully benefit from the cooling system in a more direct way.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic

The Sapphire solution belongs to the Toxic family, which indicates the top cards from ATI’s partner. The layout features a 80mm fan in the central part of the heatsink, which is covered by a plastic protective cover that follows the usual Sapphire colors, black and blue. The card’s size remains the same as a normal Radeon HD 5850, both in length and width.

The connection ports are the same as the Radeon HD 5800 series: the high-end cards from AMD are compatible with Eyefinity technology, which allow users to plug up to 3 monitors at the same time. Hence, this card features two DVI-D, one HDMI and a DisplayPort outputs.

Powercolor PCS+ Radeon HD 5870

The Powercolor model is developed based on the top GPU from the Radeon HD 5800 family: this is a solution with 1600 stream processors, and 875 MHz frequency, 25 Mhz more than the standard solution. Powercolor has also enhanced the memory frequencies by 25 MHz (effective 100MHz). The power supply remains the same, however.

During this review we’ll be analysing not much the performance, but the noise levels and the efficiency on the cooling system used by both partners and how they behave when overclocked.

Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic

The Sapphire proposal is part of the Toxic family, which identifies the models that feature the heatsink with Vapor Chamber technology, together with higher frequencies than the standard. ù

In this specific model, the GPU was set at 765 Mhz, 40 Mhz more than a normal HD 5850, while the memories were brought from 4000MHz to 4500Mhz: the possibility of having a superior cooling system that can guarantee better efficiency makes it possible to have good margins in overclocking.

This card is also made for the more enthusiast users, those that aren’t scared of tweaking frequencies for better performances.

Introduction

As it usually happens when a new graphic card is launched, there are many partners that dedicate themselves to the development of custom solutions, different from the reference models. The custom solutions are usually different when it comes to the cooling system and frequencies: those are the two most simple elements in which manufactures can make their own product unique, guaranteeing, in some cases, direct and noticeable benefits for the final user.

On another hand, it’s also true that it gets complicated choosing a card from the many options already available: the customization by partners only makes it even more difficult. Today we’ll be reviewing two solutions belonging to the HD 5800 family, and featuring higher frequencies and a custom heatsink system: The Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic and Powercolor PCS+ Radeon HD 5870.

Final Considerations

The Vapor-X proposals have always been distinguished by the high level of efficiency that Sapphire’s vapor chamber heatsink can guarantee. Also in this situation, the good heatsink can make a difference, as we’ve seen in the temperatures: during a normal game session, the Sapphire proposal hasn’t reached temperatures beyond 60°C, 10°C less than the reference model.

If in the case of the HD 4800 cards, the cooling system proposed by ATI by default was the weak point on those cards, and the Vapor-X technology from Sapphire made a huge difference, the good work from ATI on the new cards also on the cooling system has reduced the gap between the standard proposals and Sapphire’s vapor-x. The default overclocking, in this case, isn’t enough to make such a big difference in performance: the enhanced framerates are 1, or 2, and depending on the title and resolution. The energy consumption, however, considering the higher v-core, is slightly higher than the reference models.

Conclusion - Final

An important thing on this model is the fact that the many partners will have the opportunity and possibility of customizing the card as they wish. According to the informations and first images seen from the very different partner solutions, it seems that the options will differ completely from one another, going from a very cheap and competitive model to those thought for the enthusiast users. This makes a full review almost completely impossible to make, as the results and tests would highly depend on which model is being used.

In a nutshell, the Radeon HD 5830 presents itself as a very interesting card, closing a very large gap. With a slightly higher price, it’s possible for users to buy the HD 5850, which is one step further when it comes to performance. Only after the initial launch period, when the price will possibly be lower, we will be able to see a real competition for this particular model in the market.

In-Game Tests

Tom Clancy’s HAWX

AA 4x / DX10

- 2560 x 1600 - 46
- 1920 x 1200 - 84

AA 4x/DX10.1

- 2560 x 1600 - 63
- 1920 x 1200 - 86

Crysis Warhead

Frost map, AA4x, Anix 16x, DX10

- 2560 x 1600 - 25
- 1920 x 1200 - 38

The behavior of Sapphire’s solution during the tests was according to the expectations: the small overclock that this card comes with by default gives a few frames more than a reference HD 5870. The performance increase is smaller with some more demanding games, but the bottom line is: The small overclocking doesn’t show any real big enhancement, in a bigger scale.

Conclusion - Part 1

This new card presented by ATI on February was made for the medium-high range on the market: with a cost lower than $250, the card places itself between the HD 5770 and the HD 5850. As we’ve mentioned at the beginning of this review, there has been huge margin of customization left to the manufacturing partners, hence it’s easy to expect a lot of options in the market, with important differences from one another.

From a completely technical point of view, the development made on this solution isn’t incredibly new: it’s a graphic card developed on Cypress architecture, already seen on teh HD 5970, HD 5870 and HD 5850.    What we see, then, is a card based on the high-end solutions, and sharing part of its technical specifications.

Energy Consumption

One of the aspects that are worth mentioning during this series of articles is the energy consumption. Analysing the noise levels or temperatures would be more difficult and less efficient as this card is sold with many different heatsink solutions, however, hence why the lack of mention on those two details.

The Radeon HD 5830 has a declared energy consumption of 25 Watt, two less than the 27 Watts from the HD 5850 and HD 5870. Things change when checking the maximum consumption. The values given by AMD seem slightly higher than the HD 5850 (175 Watts against 151 respectively). The reasons for this are the higher frequencies, consequently forcing the need of a bit more power in order for the card to work.