AMD’s Radeon HD 5850: The Other Shoe Drops
by Ryan Smith on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power, Temperature, & Noise
With Cypress pared down some for the 5850, the power/temperature/noise situation takes on a different look. The 5870 ended up being hot, noisy, and more power-hungry than any other single-GPU setup under load. Let’s see if the 5850 can avoid that.
Looking at idle power, the results are the same as the 5870. This is to be expected as both are capable of reaching the same low idle power state. Crossfire results are similar, although the 5850 CF nudges itself higher than the 5870 CF on our charts; but this is within experimental variance.
As was the case with the 5870, the 5850 is among the lowest idling cards we have seen. It’s at the very bottom, only the Radeon HD 3870 and the GeForce GTS 250 can beat it, and even then just by a watt and a half.
Load power on the other hand gives us a surprising difference. While the 5870 was one of the most power-hungry single-GPU cards we tested, the 5850 moves half-way down the chart. At load it uses less power than 4870 and most of the GTX series, in effect using less power than all of its closest performance competitors. In fact the difference in load power is beyond the specs; AMD’s specs call for a 37W difference, but here we have an 86W difference. Even after accounting for power supply inefficiencies, this is still a huge difference. We’re not seeing clock throttling occurring, so at this point we don’t have a complete explanation for what we’re seeing beyond the fact that we’re sure these are legitimate results.
The end result is that it’s clear that the 5850 is going to work well in systems with limited power abilities. At the same power envelope it’s significantly faster than anything else, and at the same performance level it’s significantly less power hungry than anything else.
As for Crossfire, this gap closes somewhat in that configuration. Here it’s only 114W under the 5870 CF, and just 93W under the GTX SLI cards. Even with its low power usage, the 5850 can’t erase the fact that multi-card solutions eat much more power than single-card solutions; it’s 90W over the GTX295, for example.
We’ll also take a look at power usage in Warcraft quickly, since it doesn’t trigger throttling in our other AMD cards. Warcraft doesn’t push these cards like OCCT does, so the overall power usage is lower, but the overall situation is virtually the same. The 5850 comes in at 55W less than the 5870, and this time bests the entire GTX lineup by at least 25W. We also see Crossfire do better here; now the 5850 CF can beat even multi-GPU cards like the 4870X2 and the GTX 295.
Interestingly enough, in spite of the same idle power as the 5870, the idle temps are not the same. The 5850 comes in at a chilly 42C, bringing it in line with the 4850 and the 3870. Only the GTS 250 can beat it by 3C, and in turn the 5850 beats its closest competitors, the GTX series, by at least 3C.
With lower power usage and a similar cooler, the 5850 is capable of keeping cooler than the 5870. While the 5870 approached 90C, the 5850 we’re testing was able to stay at 80C. This makes it the only AMD card we’ve tested that isn’t approaching 90C, which is good news for those of you with limited case ventilation. However it still loses to the GTS 250, and most of the GTX cards. We know NVIDIA is consuming more power, so clearly they have a more effective cooler in use if it’s able to cool their cards that well.
Finally we have noise. At idle virtually everything is the same, the 5850 and the 5870 come in at 46.6dB. To see a significant difference here, we would have to switch to a passively-cooled card.
At load, the 5850 is just below the middle of the pack. Thankfully it’s not nearly as loud as the 5870, shaving off 8dB compared to its big brother and brings a Cypress-based card in to more reasonable territory. Adding a second card for Crossfire makes things louder at 61dB, but even that is still 6dB quieter than the 5870 CF.
This also shows us the tradeoffs NVIDIA made in cooling compared to AMD. The GTX 285, which was cooler running, is 6dB louder here as a result. Going by our charts the 5850 is fairly balanced in noise and temperature; it’s doesn’t need to make any trade-offs to achieve one or the other.
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chizow - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Ya it already sounds like the 5870X2 and 5850X2 are being positioned in the media to compete with just a single GT300 with rumors of $500 price points. I think the combination of poor scaling compared to RV770/RV790 in addition to some of the 5850/5870 CF scaling problems seen in today's review are major contributing factors. Really makes you wonder how much of these scaling issues are driver problems, CPU/platform limitations, or RV870 design limitiations.My best guess for GT300 pricing will be:
$500-$550 for a GTX 380 (full GT300 die) including OC variants
$380-$420 for a GTX 360 (cut down GT300) including OC variants
$250 and lower GTX 285 followed by GT210 40nm GT200 refresh with DX10.1
So you'd have the 5870X2 competing with GTX 380 in the $500-600 range. Maybe the 5850X2 in the $400-$500 range competing with the GTX 360. 5870 already looks poised for a price cut given X2 price leaks, maybe they introduce a 2GB part and keep it at the $380 range and drop the 1GB part. Then at some point I'd expect Nvidia to roll out their GT300 GX2 part as needed somewhere in the $650-700+ range.....
yacoub - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Nah. They won't get enough sales at those prices. They need to slot in under $399 and $299 unless they put out 50% more performance than the 5870 and 5850 respectively.Or the heck with them, I'll just wait six months for the refresh on a smaller die, better board layout with better cooling, lower power, and a better price tag.
It's not like i NEED DX11 now, and i certainly don't need more GPU performance than I already have.
chizow - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
How would it need to be 50% faster? It'd only need to be ~33% faster when comparing the GTX 380 to the 5870 or GTX 360 to the 5850. That would put the 5870 and 360 in direct competition in both price and performance, which is right on and similar to past market segments. The 380 would then be competing with the 5870X2 at the high-end, which would be just about right if the 5870X2 scales to ~30% over the 5870 similar to 5870CF performance in reviews.Gary Key - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
"It's not like i NEED DX11 now, and i certainly don't need more GPU performance than I already have. "As of today I am limping along on a GTX275 (LOL) and I really cannot tell any differences between the cards at 1920x1080. Considering the majority of PC games coming for the next year are console ports with a few DX10/11 highlights thrown in for marketing purposes, I am really wondering what is going to happen to the high-end GPU market. That said, I bought a 5850 anyway. ;)
chizow - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I'm running GTX 280 SLI right now and have found most modern games run extremely well with at least 4xTrMSAA enabled. But that's starting to change somewhat, especially once you throw in peripheral features like Ambient Occlusion, PhysX, Eyefinity, 3D Vision, 120Hz monitors or whatever else is next on the checkbox horizon.While some people may think these features are useless, it only really takes 1 killer app to make what you thought was plenty good enough completely insufficient. For me right now, its Batman Arkham Asylum with PhysX. Parts of the game still crawl with AA + PhysX enabled.
Same for anyone looking at Eyefinity as a viable gaming option. Increasing GPU load three-fold is going to quickly eat into the 5850/5870's increase over last-gen parts to the point a single card isn't suitable.
And with Win7's launch and the rollout of DX11 and DirectCompute, we may finally start to see developers embrace GPU accelerated physics, which will again, raise the bar in terms of performance requirements.
There's no doubt the IHVs are looking at peripheral features to justify additional hardware costs, but I think the high-end GPU market will be safe at least through this round even without them. Maybe next round as some of these features take hold, they'll help justify the next round of high-end GPU.
chrnochime - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
With PC gaming seemingly going towards MMO like WoW/Aion/Warhammer (and later on Diablo 3) and far less emphasis on other genre(besides FPS, which is more or less the same every year), and as you said most new games being console ports, I really doubt we'll need anything more powerful than the 4890, let alone a 5850 or 5870 for the coming couple of years. Maybe we've enter the era where PC games will forever be just console ports + MMO, or just MMO, and there'd be little incentive to buy any card that cost 100+.Just my take of course.
C'DaleRider - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I was told by a Microcenter employee the current pre-order retail price for the top end GT300 card was $579, an EVGA card, btw. And reportedly the next model down is the GT350. Dunno if this is fact or not, but he didn't have any reason to lie.Zool - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
The GT300 will need 512bit gddr5 to make memory faster than GT200 and it will hawe even more masive GPGPU bloat than last gen. So in folding it will be surely much faster but in graphic it will cost much more for the same(at least for nvidia depending how close they want to bring it to radeon 5k). And of course they can sell the same gt300 in tesla cards for several thousand(like they did with gt200).The 5850 price with disabled units is still win for ati or else they wouldnt sell the defect gpu at all.
Genx87 - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
GDDR5 provides double the bandwidth of CGDDR3. No need for 512bit memory bus. This was covered in another story on the front of this site.dagamer34 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
As great as these cards are, my system only supports low-profile cards since it's a HTPC. Bring on the Radeon HD 5650 & 5670!!!!