Today, on 23 September, 2009, Â AMD company officially presented the new video card series radeon HD 5800. Thus it consists on two models, 5870 and 5850.

New video adapters are considerably  more powerful in comparison with previous series 4800, they are characterized by  directX 11 technology . The chip RV870, is released on 40- nm technical process and consists of 2,15 billion transistors (2,3 times more than in Radeon 4800), and their total area composes 3300 mm2.

New graphic accelerators are literally coupled with the most contemporary technologies: besides DirectX 11 they work with Shader model 5.0, DirectCompute 11, OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL 1.0, ATI stream, CrossFireX, Avivo HD video and even with UVD 2 and also the technology ATI Â eyefinity, which allow to connect one video card to six monitors. Radeon 5870 and 5850 support the resolution 2560x1600 and they are equipped with GDDR5 memory with volume from 1 to 2 Gb.

Now let us examine the fundamental and frequency characteristics of new video adapters. The quantity of stream processors in 5870 and 5850 composes 1600 and 1440 pieces respectively, and the textural blocks are  80 and 72. The core in 5870 operates at the frequency of 850 MHz, and in 5850 at 725 MHz. The memory interface in both card is identical – 256- bit.

Radeon HD 5870 possesses the productivity 2,72 TF, and 5850 – 2,09 teraflops, these indices are two times higher than in the series 4800.  AMD Specialists emphasize that their new graphic accelerators, based on RV870 video chip , possess the very low energy consumption level , it is only 27 W, while the popular now  4870 accelerator consumes 97 W.

The required power during the peak load for 5800 is of course higher, but only by 28 W.

The recommended retail price of 5870 is 400 dollars, and 5850 is cheaper than  300 dollars. The GeForce GTX 295 mentioned above is evaluated by the producer as a minimum at 500 dollars. Let us finally give the results in a pair of benchmark- tests, DMark, and the second in the game call of duty world at war.




