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ATI Radeon HD 5850 Graphics Card Review The battle between ATI and Nvidia has
been a long and bitter one that at one point seemed like Nvidia had emerged
victorious only to now find the opposite is closer to the truth. These two
giants have the entire consumer GPU market between them (ignoring Intel's
onboard graphics option on some motherboards and Intel's forthcoming Larrabee
GPU which we cannot predict the performance of yet) with very different
strategies.
Nvidia went for the high end where margins are higher but volumes lower while ATI consolidated their "bread and butter" mainstream market. At the end of the day, ATI was able to offer a better price/performance solution while Nvidia was left struggling with insufficient product differentiation and even had to result to marketing trickery through renaming existing product offerings.
ATIs strategy has been so successful that low end success has allowed them to challenge at the high end and now ATI graphics cards offer the best performance as well as the cheapest entry points. Nvidia have no answer until their much speculated "Fermi" product is released some time this year.
Specifications - removed to save space, please refer to html version of article for details
The GPU
Unlike the 4800 series, the 5800 series is encased in a sheath that is 9.5" long on the 5850 and 10 PCB Prototype Manufacturer.5" on the 5870. Two 6-pin PCIe connectors provide power to the card (these must both be used) though no 8-pin connector is required.
This is a dual slot design and has 4 connectors on the plate (1 HDMI, 1 Display Port and 2 DVI) and all this restricts space for vented air from the hefty cooler.
The shroud does not extend to the back as with the 5870 so you can see the PCB and GPU heatsink retention bracket. Like the 5870, the 5850's cooler has a barrel fan that draws air into the shroud, where it is forced through the heatsink and partially exhausted from the system through vents in the card's mounting plate. Two more vents at the back of the card also direct some air that is vented within the system.
We selected Far Cry 2 (first person shooter), HAWX (air combat) and Resident Evil 5 (horror) for our tests as they are newer titles that are suited to benchmarking and make most systems struggle.
The real purpose of this review is to see DX11 and the benefits that are unique to the ATI 58XX and 57XX series. It's tricky to test to see how much of a speed difference DX11 makes as there are no real reliable DX11 benchmarks but as a showcase of DX11 quality the situation is much better. We used Unigine's Heaven Benchmark and can only convey the quality to our readers via YouTube.
The improvement in quality is apparent for all to see Prototype PCB.
This next video shows the effects of Hardware Tessellation. The technical white paper on this feature is enough to send the most avid technophile to sleep but there's no denying the benefits of the end result.
If you have a DirectX 11 card then you can download the demo for yourself at http://www.ronpcb.com/
Test Results
First we will look at the dependency of this GPU on the system processor and the importance of having multiple cores to get the best graphics performance.
The results show fairly linear scaling as we go up in cores. It should be noted that synthetic tests such as SiSoft Sandra will scale quite well and are mainly useful as an indication of bottlenecks and to see what programmers can achieve if they overcome the hurdles they face.
The purpose of the review has been to avoid endless comparisons against many different cards and the marketplace is so crowded that it's confusing for consumers to differentiate between the old and new offerings (no thanks in part to Nvidia's rebadging of old products with new nomenclature).
The key conclusion is that the Radeon HD5850 offers better price/performance than any competing product and will be a worthy component in a high end system (5870 and 5970 are available for those wishing to go the extra distance). More importantly is the provision of DirectX 11 and the new features which promise to add greater realism and for which there are no competitors at present.
Anyone looking for a graphics card that is cutting edge, plays all the latest games at high settings and is as future proof as its possible to get right now, will find this product to be ideal. We have no hesitation in recommending the Radeon HD 5850 and applaud AMD/ATI for leading the industry with new and innovative features.
more...
http://pcbonline.sosblog.fr/Premier-blog-b1/Techni...
Nvidia went for the high end where margins are higher but volumes lower while ATI consolidated their "bread and butter" mainstream market. At the end of the day, ATI was able to offer a better price/performance solution while Nvidia was left struggling with insufficient product differentiation and even had to result to marketing trickery through renaming existing product offerings.
ATIs strategy has been so successful that low end success has allowed them to challenge at the high end and now ATI graphics cards offer the best performance as well as the cheapest entry points. Nvidia have no answer until their much speculated "Fermi" product is released some time this year.
Specifications - removed to save space, please refer to html version of article for details
The GPU
Unlike the 4800 series, the 5800 series is encased in a sheath that is 9.5" long on the 5850 and 10 PCB Prototype Manufacturer.5" on the 5870. Two 6-pin PCIe connectors provide power to the card (these must both be used) though no 8-pin connector is required.
This is a dual slot design and has 4 connectors on the plate (1 HDMI, 1 Display Port and 2 DVI) and all this restricts space for vented air from the hefty cooler.
The shroud does not extend to the back as with the 5870 so you can see the PCB and GPU heatsink retention bracket. Like the 5870, the 5850's cooler has a barrel fan that draws air into the shroud, where it is forced through the heatsink and partially exhausted from the system through vents in the card's mounting plate. Two more vents at the back of the card also direct some air that is vented within the system.
We selected Far Cry 2 (first person shooter), HAWX (air combat) and Resident Evil 5 (horror) for our tests as they are newer titles that are suited to benchmarking and make most systems struggle.
The real purpose of this review is to see DX11 and the benefits that are unique to the ATI 58XX and 57XX series. It's tricky to test to see how much of a speed difference DX11 makes as there are no real reliable DX11 benchmarks but as a showcase of DX11 quality the situation is much better. We used Unigine's Heaven Benchmark and can only convey the quality to our readers via YouTube.
The improvement in quality is apparent for all to see Prototype PCB.
This next video shows the effects of Hardware Tessellation. The technical white paper on this feature is enough to send the most avid technophile to sleep but there's no denying the benefits of the end result.
If you have a DirectX 11 card then you can download the demo for yourself at http://www.ronpcb.com/
Test Results
First we will look at the dependency of this GPU on the system processor and the importance of having multiple cores to get the best graphics performance.
The results show fairly linear scaling as we go up in cores. It should be noted that synthetic tests such as SiSoft Sandra will scale quite well and are mainly useful as an indication of bottlenecks and to see what programmers can achieve if they overcome the hurdles they face.
The purpose of the review has been to avoid endless comparisons against many different cards and the marketplace is so crowded that it's confusing for consumers to differentiate between the old and new offerings (no thanks in part to Nvidia's rebadging of old products with new nomenclature).
The key conclusion is that the Radeon HD5850 offers better price/performance than any competing product and will be a worthy component in a high end system (5870 and 5970 are available for those wishing to go the extra distance). More importantly is the provision of DirectX 11 and the new features which promise to add greater realism and for which there are no competitors at present.
Anyone looking for a graphics card that is cutting edge, plays all the latest games at high settings and is as future proof as its possible to get right now, will find this product to be ideal. We have no hesitation in recommending the Radeon HD 5850 and applaud AMD/ATI for leading the industry with new and innovative features.
more...
http://pcbonline.sosblog.fr/Premier-blog-b1/Techni...
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