The PC Report

This is now the 8th card to be released into ATI’s Evergreen GPU family and this time it will bridge the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850. The ATI Radeon HD 5830 packs the same Eyefinity, DirectX 11 and PowerPlay support as it’s older brothers, and comes loaded with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1000 MHz. Joining in with the 5870 and 5850, the GPU present on the board contains 2.15 billion transistors, however it has only 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units and a core clock speed of 800 MHz – the total power of the card is 1.79 TFLOPS.

Looking at the card (check the pic above) you’ll see that the card is roughly the same size as the HD 5870, and almost identical in design. It comes with two DVI ports, HDMI with audio and a DisplayPort (perfect for 3 display Eyefinity). It’s also a dual-slot card and needs two 6-pin PCIe power inputs to support the card’s 175W max power, which is higher than the HD 5850 due to a higher core clock; the idle power is lower though at 25W.

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Never fear! Another Radeon is here! And so soon too after we saw the HD 5450 just last week. Anyway the new card is the ATI Radeon HD 5570 and of course it supports DirectX 11, Eyefinity and all the other features that the HD 5000 series cards have. The HD 5570, like the HD 5450, is targeted at the HTPC users with its low profile, low power consumption, low price and quiet cooler.

The HD 5450 is made on the 40nm process and has 627 million transistors on its die. The core clock comes in at 650MHz with 400 stream processors and 20 texture units for a total power of 520 GFLOPS. The card will have 1GB of DDR3 RAM on board with a clock of 900MHz and a data rate of 1.8 Gbps. It’s also rated at using 9.7W of power during idle with a “typical” rating of 38W.

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AMD has been on fire recently releasing card after card into their DirectX 11 HD 5000 series. Now they are catering to those who want to build a HTPC with the newest card – the ATI Radeon HD 5450. The HD 5450 has much the same features as the bigger and more powerful brothers, including DirectX 11 support and ATI’s Eyefinity multi-display technology. The card is very power friendly (~20W when in use) and is half height and passively cooled making it perfect for your HTPC.

The HD 5450 performs well for what you need it to, namely all types of media playback including Blu-ray/1080p – which is perfect with low CPU utilisation. However, if you’re planning to buy this card for gaming, thing again. It consistently performed well under the it’s nearest brother, the HD 5670, in many games so don’t even bother gaming on this card. This card starts at US$49 and should be perfect for HTPC that needs to be silent, low powered and small.

Note: This card underperforms all 25 cards on our graphics card rankings list, so it has not been added.

ATI is getting around to filling out the lower-end of their DirectX 11 compatible series with their latest release: the ATI Radeon HD 5670. The new card is made on the same 40nm process as its bigger brothers, carries either 1GB or 512MB GDDR5 RAM and is fully compatible with both DirectX 11 and ATI’s multi-monitor Eyefinity technology.

Performance wise, the HD 5670 is on-par with the performance of Nvidia’s GT 240 card, if not slightly better in real-world testing while using less power to boot. However, of course, this card isn’t really designed for gaming (being a lower-end 5000 series card) so don’t expect fantastic framerates in the latest games. But, for under US$100 you wont find a better card with the same wealth of features.

It appears as though HP has leaked a huge heap of info about some upcoming products they are releasing, including info about new Intel processors and ATI graphics cards, along with the new HP software suite. All of the leaked info looks current and details the new North American Spring 2010 line-up from HP, which by the looks of it is going to be a good line-up.

In the new HP Pavillion desktop computers it appears as though we will be seeing the latest from Intel’s Clarkdale range. The new Core i5-6xx processors will be included, featuring Intel’s Turbo Boost technology that can speed up certain cores depending on the workload at hand. Core i3-5xx processors are also going to be used, however these will feature a lowered L3 cache and no Turbo Boost technology. It is also speculated that the HP TouchSmart will be getting an upgrade to the Arrandale Core i5 and i7s.

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Enjoying your top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 295? Well sorry fellas, that card is no longer the best, with ATI claiming the top spot with their new HD 5970 dual-GPU beast. The card boasts an amazing 4.64 TFLOPs of power thanks to 4.3 billion 40nm transistors on the single PCB. The card packs what appears to be mixed specs between the HD 5850 and HD 5870: a 750MHz core clock, 3200 stream processors and 2GB of GDDR5 running at 1GHz.

The card is also quite large, coming in at 30cm (12″) which is so large it should overhang the length of most ATX motherboards. The card also guzzles a fair bit of power – 294W while in full load and 50W while in idle – so you’d better have a pretty good PSU to accommodate this beast. The card comes loaded with two DVI ports and a DisplayPort with capabilities for a 3-display EyeFinity setup and DirectX 11.

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It seems like only yesterday that ATI released their HD 5870 and HD 5850 graphics cards, and now we’re seeing some new mainstream DX11 graphics cards: the 5700 series. Both the 5770 and 5750 are built on the 40nm process, contain 1.04 billion transistors and come with GDDR5 memory along with DX11 support. However, the 5770 is clocked slightly higher at 850 MHz core clock vs. the 5850’s 700 MHz

The 5770 performed quite well in benchmarks, placing itself just below the Nvidia GTX 260 Core 216 and HD 4890 or around the performance of a 4870. The 5750 performed around 10-20% less than the 5770. The HD 5770 is now on sale for US$159 (around the same price as a HD 4870), and the HD 5750 is available for US$129 (around the same price as a 9800 GTX+ or HD 4850). Grab the cards now from your favourite retailers.

AMD was hoping that both cards in its new HD 5800 series line-up would be shipped and released on the same day, but due to unknown complications it appears as though only now has the ATI Radeon HD 5850 been shipped and reviewed. Unlike the bigger brother HD 5870, the HD 5850 will ship at a cheaper price of US$259 (compared to US$379 for the HD 5870). The card is also shorter in PCB length, packs fewer stream processors and has a decreased clock and memory speeds.

Both cards are still powered by the same, DirectX 11 allowing chip and the cheaper HD 5850 still has many features of its big brother such as ATI’s Eyefinity technology. That said, the card is still very, very good for its price. The card comes very close in performance to Nvidia’s GTX 285, and in some cases (such as Crysis), managed to beat the US$299 card by a small margin. Hit up this link to see a full review for card which is truly bang-for-your-buck.

It looks like you can be one of the first to get your hands on a new ATI Radeon HD 5870, as Newegg has put up the card for pre-order for US$379.99 for the 1GB edition. The card is listed as having an 850 MHz core clock along with 1GB of GDDR5 memory at a 1200 MHz (4.8 Gb/s) clock on a 256-bit bus. It also appears to have four display connectors: 2 DVI, 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort; perfect for that new Eyefinity technology and upcoming DX11 games

Pre-order the card now for cheap while you can, or wait for the official release and benchmark results to come through. For this price it should be a much better buy than the slightly cheaper Nvidia GTX 285.

Update: The GPU has been officially released and reviewed. It looks like the graphics card is considerably better than the GTX 285, and in some cases managed to beat the dual-GPU HD 4870 X2.