ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review
The ATI Radeon HD 5870 review shows a new rise of excitement within ATI/AMD because of the Direct X 11 GPU that has come out. Some previous engagements between ATI and Nvidia took place as well, but that is old news with the HD 4870. ATI has had great success with their pricing strategy and you can be the same with this computer video card.
ATI has already scheduled the release of this computer video card with the Windows 7 release. They have been optimized for each other to provide greater performance for the user and their needs. However, ATI went and extra step and double the power of the ATI Radeon HD 5870 by just doubling all characteristics in that computer video card that are related to performance (Memory Bandwidth, Transistors, Texter, Shader, etc…).
The first thing you will notice when you purchase this card is its extreme length. It is longer than any of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 series cards and just as wide. It still fills 2 expansion slots completely. The card is completely covered in hard black and red plastic with a single fan on the top to intake air and air vents that can purposively expel air, but they truly serve no purpose.
This card has somehow gone grew with its downgrade power consumption. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 used to consume 90 watts and now the ATI Radeon HD 5870 consumes 27 watts. The optimizations on the computer video card and the lowering of the clock speed has helped the idle and max load wattage usage for the ATI Radeon HD 5870 computer video card greatly.
When you talk about power you obviously have to talk about noise and heat. I already know that this card registers a couple decibels above its competition over at Nvidia, but when you run a dual setup it is even worse. I would suggest not running two unless you are a person that likes a little noise or have a concrete computer case.
The heat is even a bigger problem. Low and below the slot in the computer video card lets out about half of the heat right back into the case. This can cause the heat inside to build up very quickly even when not doing anything. I would suggest a robust cooling option when dealing with this card. If you are wild enough to try to I will highly suggest you seek another form of cooling other than air.
DirectX 11
When you starting thinking about DirectX 11, you may wonder what the big deal is. Why do people care so much about this release and what is so different from the last one? A couple of things from the past and new technologies at emerged within this release. I will explain them briefly below.
Tessellation is something that ATI has had for a long time, but its utilization has never really been marketed well by third party vendors. It deals with providing more polygons on the screen. This gives you the realism of curves and features on the graphics on your screen. This is particularly a game feature that is widely used. If you have more polygons the more lifelike the game looks. DirectX 11 has taken this technology and built it into its new release to better use it.
The Shader Model 5.0 is a whole new way of programming the API for better usage of multi-threaded processors. It works very well when you can split up all your processes into a single thread. The performance boost from that alone is amazing.
DirectCompute controls all the big updates you get from consecutive releases of DirectX. Graphic modeling overlapping has been a hot topic for this feature and how it uses less computer CPU power than in previous DirectX releases. Looking from my video transcoding experience this feature is great to finally have in this software finally. Games could have been using this technology to provide better video rendering for years now. It is funny how some new technologies are right under your nose. Worst part is I knew about this one…..
Texture compression technology has taken a boost since DirectX 11 has come out as well. The BC6 technology allows you 6:1 compression and BC7 allows 3:1 compression. That is more than enough for this computer video card to handle.
Conclusion
The real deal of the ATI Radeon HD 5870 review is the fact that it is a contest between ATI and Nvidia. We can only speculate how well these will do with Windows 7, DirectX 11 and games that are built on these new technologies. We know that by just looking at the basics it is a better card with power and technology.
We must not forget that the final determining factor will come down to price. Since ATI is selling this very close facsimile to Nvidia’s top computer video card at 1/3rd the price they have no choice, but to play ball or game home!
Dwight Norris – Computer Parts Review Website Owner
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Kategorie: Netbooks Review Articles, Aktualisiert am December 31, 2009 von admin | Log in