AMD’s Radeon HD 5830: A Filler Card at the Wrong Price
by Ryan Smith on February 24, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Also Announced: Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition
While we were being briefed about the 5830, AMD also used the opportunity to tell us about the 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. You may better know this card as Trillian, a card that AMD was showing off (but not naming) all the way back at their 5800 series launch event in September. The 5870E6 is the 6 port mini-DisplayPort card that AMD was using to drive their 6 monitor and 24 monitor setups during the event.
AMD is finally ready to launch the card (and we’re assuming the 6 display Samsung mega-monitor is done too) which is why AMD is announcing it today. We have the complete specs of the card, but AMD is not quite ready to discuss its performance so we have yet to receive a sample card nor can we talk about its expected performance until a later date.
| AMD Radeon HD 5970 | AMD Radeon HD 5870E6 | AMD Radeon HD 5870 | AMD Radeon HD 5850 | |
| Stream Processors | 2x1600 | 1600 | 1600 | 1440 |
| Texture Units | 2x80 | 80 | 80 | 72 |
| ROPs | 2x32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Core Clock | 725MHz | 850MHz | 850MHz | 725MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 2x256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Frame Buffer | 2x1GB | 2GB | 1GB | 1GB |
| Transistor Count | 2x2.15B | 2.15B | 2.15B | 2.15B |
| TDP | 294W | 228W | 188W | 151W |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm |
| Price Point | $599 | >$400 | $400 | $300 |
In a nutshell, the 5870E6 is a 2GB version of the 5870 equipped with 6 mini-DisplayPorts for its output. The core and memory clocks are the same as the regular 5870, while the extra RAM is to cover the larger framebuffer that would be required for such a large surface (6 1080P monitors would be 12.5MP). AMD has to equip the card with 16 GDDR5 chips in 16bit mode (as opposed to 8 chips in 32bit mode) to get 2GB of memory, so the power usage of the card will be 228W under load, and 34W idle. This means it will take a 6pin PCIe power plug and an 8pin power plug to drive the card, the only 5800 series card to have such a requirement.
AMD will once again be using the 5800/5900 series trademark shrouded cooler, this time with a full vent along the second slot to deal with the additional heat from the extra GDDR5 chips. At this point we don’t know how long the card will be, although we wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being longer to fit the extra GDDR5 chips and power circuitry.
In order to drive adoption and to make things a bit easier for buyers, AMD will be having their partners include a number of dongles with the card so that no one is caught completely off guard by the exclusive use of mini-DP. The 5870E6 will come with 2 mini-DP to DP dongles, 2 mini-DP to single-link DVI dongles, and a single mini-DP to HDMI dongle. This will give the 5870E6 a similar degree of output flexibility as the 5870, even though it’s composed entirely of mini-DP ports.
Since this is still being driven by Cypress, the clock source limitation has not changed. Cypress only has 2 clock sources for DVI-type displays, so the 5870E6 can only drive up to 2 DVI/HDMI displays using passive adapters. Furthermore if you want to drive a 2560 display or a 120Hz 1920 display, you’re going to need active adapters regardless of clock sources. So if you’re thinking of buying this as a 2GB 5870 to drive your 2560 DVI monitor, you’re still going to be shelling out another $100 for an active adapter. Even with the dongles, it’s clear that this card really is meant to be paired with DP/mini-DP monitors for the long-run.
As for pricing information, AMD has not announced a final price for the card. But since the regular 5870 is already at $400 it’s safe to tell you that this card will be in excess of $400.
Finally, we’re left wondering whether this card is a bit ahead of its time. Eyefinity is certainly ready (particularly with the Catalyst 10.3 driver additions that will be coming) but AMD’s current power situation means that they can either offer a 2GB 5870 or a 2GB (1GB effective) 5970, but not a 4GB (2GB effective) 5970. Based on our reviews of the 5870 and 5970 we’re not convinced that a 5870 is fast enough to drive 6 monitors and run games at a high level of detail at the same time, and at the same time more memory would seem to be critical for the frame buffer size that would result from such a setup. With Crossfire Eyefinity fully working as of the Catalyst 10.2 drivers, we suspect anyone serious about a 6 monitor setup is going to want to go for a pair of these cards in Crossfire mode so that they have the rendering performance to drive such a high resolution display. It would be costly (>$800) but then again so would a 6 monitor setup.
We’ll have more on the 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition once it launches.
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7Enigma - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
And as a follow-up, could you OC the 5830's core clock 50MHz and rerun one of the tests that has the 4890 beating it by 20%? I'm just wondering if the core clock is starving the card so badly that it's compounding the performance issue.geok1ng - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
We should see more and more of these builds on future generations.Die yields are unpredictable, so a chip project should predict a product line with many degrees of performance.
i wouldn't mind having 5890, 5880,5870,5860,5850,5840,5830,5820 and even a 5810, as long as all offer equivalent performance for the price asked, which is NOT the case here.
As for the 5870E6, well, it is nice to have a 2GB card that is incapable of driving a 30" monitor. Either lower its price or make an arrangement for mass production of miniDP-Dual-link DVI adapters.
If AMD is ready to start taking momentum on premium niche market spots, i suggest a Watercooled 5970E6 with 2GB per GPU 4GB total. As it stand it make more sense for a massive E6 setup to go the dual 5850 way, at least one would avoid adapters costs.
AznBoi36 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I'm actually very happy with AMD's lineup as it is. At least it's nowhere as confusing as Nvidia with all their re-branding and crap they've pulled.flipmode - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
Quite simply, the price of this card is insulting and the performance is disappointing.It's slower than a 4890 but 20% more expensive? Ludicrous, ridiculous.
AMD, this is not the way to treat your customers. I'm all for you making profit, but why don't you try to make some profit with a reasonably priced product?
Just as important, how bout giving us some cards that don't suck? 5870 and 5850 are nice, but everything else you've released has been disappointing and overpriced.
Thanks for the review Ryan.
silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
This card, if anything, is more like a 5810 (if one existed) than anything else. It's simply just too cut down; if they'd disabled two SIMDs it'd be far more deserving of its current price tag, and they could've resisted raising the core clock to compensate.The 4830 was far less cut down in comparison to the 4850.
silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
Just to add, if all of the 5830 dies are more defective than the 5850 dies, the question remains how defective they are. Some have to be good enough to the point where they just missed the cut for the 5850 but only have one additional defective SIMD, and it would be very nice to be able to unlock this. If that's not possible, couldn't AMD just release an interim product with 1280 SP/64 TU/24 ROP? They can't all be damaged to a similar degree.AznBoi36 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
I guess yields at 40nm are "that" bad.Scali - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
"and in the case of OpenCL AMD doesn’t even distribute their OpenCL driver with the rest of their Catalyst driver set yet."You said it!
I'm getting pretty annoyed by this right now.
AMD had been promoting OpenCL for months, and driver release after driver release, I find NO OpenCL runtimes included.
nVidia has offered OpenCL to end-users in their official WHQL driver releases since November last year.
AMD end-users still have nothing, three months later. Which also means that developers can't release OpenCL applications to end-users with AMD hardware. And originally we were told that they would arrive in Q2 2009.
Pretty ironic, when it was AMD that was promoting OpenCL all the time, and trying to paint nVidia as the evil proprietary Cuda guy, that was not going to support OpenCL.
stmok - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
According to this...=> http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/Pages/de...">http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/Pages/de...
...OpenCL support for ATI cards began in ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers.
For Nvidia, OpenCL developer tools is here...
=> http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl.html">http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl.html
Both AMD and Nvidia support OpenCL. Developer tools on both sides are available.
leexgx - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link
OpenCL should come with the drivers no matter the size on http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=...">http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=...most may just stick with cuda at this time
quite sure i have read some where that you need to code for Nvidia OpenCL as well as ATI OpenCL