HD5870 cards by HIS, Gigabyte and XFX

With the official reviews of the Radeon HD5800 graphics cards being released on several sites, its now up to the manufacturer's to promote their own models of the DirectX 11 GPU. As always at the launch of a new generation of cards, all manufacturers are using AMD's reference PCB design and clock frequencies.

After images of cards by Sapphire and XFX surfaced on the internet, details of other companies such as Gigabyte and HIS are now available as well. All manufacturers will launch the cheaper Radeon HD5850 card as well, which features lower clock frequencies and less shader units than its HD5870 counterpart. All Radeon HD5870 cards sport a core clock frequency of 850 MHz, while the GDDR5 memory has an effective frequency of 4800 MHz. The HD4850, which is a bit smaller in length as well, has a reference core clock of 725 MHz and 4000 MHz for the GDDR5 memory. Both cards are equipped with two six-pin power connectors and have a specified TDP value of 188 and 170 Watt for respectively the HD5870 and HD5850. Both cards are reported to use 27 watt while idle.

At the moment, all manufacturers have equipped the cards with the standard amount of 1GB memory, but it's quite likely that models with 2GB of memory will be launched when the availability increases. Almost all brands bundle a voucher for Dirt 2 with the card, the first game that'll intensively use DirectX 11's new features.

All HD5800 cards support the new Eyefinity, a technology that allows multiple monitors to be combined to one large surface, making it possible to connect up to six large monitors on a single GPU. It's expected that this technology won't only draw the attention of gamers, but that of the business market as well. As part of the DirectX 11 specifications, these new Radeon graphics cards feature a so-called compute shader, which makes it a lot easier to run GPGPU calculations on the graphics card.

Consumers trying to acquire an HD5800 card will need to be quick, sources report that once the first shipment runs out, it'll take quite a while for stocks to be replenished.

Radeon HD5870 by Sapphire

Radeon HD5870 by Gigabyte

Radeon HD5850 by HiS

Radeon HD5870 by XFX

Tags: gddr5 gpgpu hd4850 radeon directx directx11 eyefinity

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