Date:
Tuesday , September 22, 2009
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review

AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5800 series debuts today and the new ATI Radeon HD 5870 is now available. We will give you all the gritty details of the HD 5800 Series, and show you just how well the new flagship ATI Radeon HD 5870 accelerates games. Can you say, “I like twice as much performance in the same power envelope.”

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ATI Radeon HD 5870 Pictures

Today we have the ATI Radeon HD 5870 to evaluate. We do not have the ATI Radeon HD 5850 yet. AMD is pushing out the ATI Radeon HD 5870 video cards first, in mass quantity they say, but the HD 5850 cards are on the board to come out in a week or two. Some may trickle out there now, but the majority of the 5850’s should be in stores around the end of this month.

Keep in mind that today does not represent a traditional hard launch. We will see systems containing the 5870 for sale today with 5870 cards to follow in about a week or so according to AMD. We have asked about quantities and AMD assures us there will be plenty in stock for the holidays.

While at AMD’s headquarters we were able to snag some nude pictures of the ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU, printed circuit board and heatsink/fan unit. Please excuse the poor image quality and lighting in some of the pictures.

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In the first picture you can see a great shot of the GPU. Die size on the Radeon HD 5870 is 334mm2. The back is laden with interconnects.

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Here you can see the bare printed circuit board (PCB), sans GPU. Despite the complexity of the specifications of the GPU itself, including Eyefinity, the PCB doesn’t look any more complex than other current generation video cards. There certainly isn’t anything that jumps out as being overly excessive. Only two PCIe power connectors are required for operation on the Radeon HD 5870.

The memory modules on this particular PCB are engineering modules according to Samsung’s Semiconductor website. They are rated at .4ns for 5GHz at 1.5v. Of course, production video cards will use different memory with different maximum speed ratings and voltages. We are told that many production boards may sport GDDR5 modules rated at 5.5GHz theoretical maximum. Our evaluation sample may not use RAM that is typical to find in most retail video cards, and therefore overclocking may not match.

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Here are some high quality pictures of what the entire video card looks like. Note that the first three pictures are the Radeon HD 5870 and the final picture is of the Radeon HD 5850.

You will notice that AMD is employing a fully covered video card design in this generation, similar to what NVIDIA has been doing with the GTX 260/280/285 video cards. The heatsink is under the shroud, and air is pulled in and exhausted out the back of the case, mostly. There are actually vents on the top of the shroud which allow hot air to be evacuated right into your case.

You will find on these Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort. Through these combinations Eyefinity is possible. The maximum supported display size on the HD 5870 and HD 5850 is 3x 2560x1600. The special 4 card / 24 display exhibits being shown for Eyefinity work with a special 6x mini-Display Port HD 5870 video card that will be out in November.

CrossFireX is supported in dual and triple modes. Once Hemlock is out, then we will see Quad-CrossFireX in this generation. As we mentioned above, only two auxiliary PCIe power connectors are required on the HD 5870. It should be mentioned as of writing this, Eyefinity does not support CrossFireX, but we fully expect it to very soon. It was explained to us by AMD that a few software hurdles were left to leap before Eyefinity CrossFireX becomes a reality.