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The New ATI Radeon HD 5990!

harryohh said:
£900 (if it is indeed the price) is ridiculous.You could get two regular 5970s for that and I have no doubt which would be better even with rubbish 4 gpu scaling.

If that doesn't float your boat get 2 GTX 480s.Lower price and higher prices.

We need to see the 5890 for sure.
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£900 is what you pay for the toxic.

The 5870 toxic is £400 so considering the extra engineering shrinking those two cards down to one it's understandable.
 
Meaker said:
£900 is what you pay for the toxic.

The 5870 toxic is £400 so considering the extra engineering shrinking those two cards down to one it's understandable.
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It wouldn't make much sense if buying two 5870 toxics is cheaper.It's not understanable in the slightest.
 
Meaker said:
Because the single PCB is:

1. Harder to design.
2. More conveinient.
3. More expensive to make.
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Yes and no.

Harder to design, maybe, but they've hardly broken the mould from the reference 2GB 5970 by the look of things, small tweaks really, nothing major, unlike the Ares complete redesign. Plus you pay someone to design it, right? You don't give them royalties, surely?

More convenient, I will probably give you that, but CF 5870s isn't exactly inconvenient these days with multi-PCIe x16s, unless you own an nForce board...

More expensive is a matter of debate. On the whole I will agree the PCB is more expensive than a 5870. But to build the whole card is cheaper than 2x 5870s, as you are using the components of 2 cards on 1 board, rather than 2, and the 5870s boards are what 80-90% the size of a 5970 to begin with, so they will cost a good chuck themselves, so 1 board should cost less, right?

I mean like I said before they apparently give you a DVI-DP adaptor which will add a nice hundy to the price with the premium of it (so those who want can run Eyefinity 3 with no need to run out and buy an adaptor if you don't have a DP enabled display, but then anyone who wants to do that probably knows it'll be needed anyway and could add one themselves IF they need it), so it probably comes to around the 800 mark if you lose the accessory bundle, but I still think it's too much of a bump up from a 5970 2GB, as the only thing this has over that is the extra memory, which makes very little difference outside of 2000000x SSAA enabled games... i.e. Never.

The regular 5970 overclocks quite well from what I have seen, to the equal of the Non-Toxic at least (even if it requires a bump in voltage). It's just a £400 premium for a little extra memory a slight overclock and a cooler I would probably end up ripping off for a waterblock is too much. Most people agree too. £700 should probably be the mark this hits, but it looks like it'll miss it. £700 I could probably say "Yeah, the premium is probably worth it in the long run", but almost double the price? No way! It needs to be extra special for that much.

I doubt the dollar-pound rates are helping much either though.
 
dillingerdan said:
Yes and no.

Harder to design, maybe, but they've hardly broken the mould from the reference 2GB 5970 by the look of things, small tweaks really, nothing major, unlike the Ares complete redesign. Plus you pay someone to design it, right? You don't give them royalties, surely?

Well they will be paying a decent sum for the cooler thats for sure. But with double the number of ram chips over a normal 5970 its not exactly cut a paste.

More convenient, I will probably give you that, but CF 5870s isn't exactly inconvenient these days with multi-PCIe x16s, unless you own an nForce board...

Or if you are in a tighter thermal environment where the extra space will pay off.

More expensive is a matter of debate. On the whole I will agree the PCB is more expensive than a 5870. But to build the whole card is cheaper than 2x 5870s, as you are using the components of 2 cards on 1 board, rather than 2, and the 5870s boards are what 80-90% the size of a 5970 to begin with, so they will cost a good chuck themselves, so 1 board should cost less, right?

The PCB cost will be relativly small though higher as you can relate it directly to the number of vias (layer interconnections) and I can bet a whole lot that theres a whack more of them in this design. It's also an exponential relationship.

It's more the componants on the PCB that have to be rated for MUCH tighter tolerances and thats going to make them a LOT more expensive, they might look similar but thats where the similarities can end.

I mean like I said before they apparently give you a DVI-DP adaptor which will add a nice hundy to the price with the premium of it (so those who want can run Eyefinity 3 with no need to run out and buy an adaptor if you don't have a DP enabled display, but then anyone who wants to do that probably knows it'll be needed anyway and could add one themselves IF they need it), so it probably comes to around the 800 mark if you lose the accessory bundle, but I still think it's too much of a bump up from a 5970 2GB, as the only thing this has over that is the extra memory, which makes very little difference outside of 2000000x SSAA enabled games... i.e. Never.

The clock speed bump from 725mhz core to 900mhz core will also help against the 5970 reference ;)

The regular 5970 overclocks quite well from what I have seen, to the equal of the Non-Toxic at least (even if it requires a bump in voltage). It's just a £400 premium for a little extra memory a slight overclock and a cooler I would probably end up ripping off for a waterblock is too much. Most people agree too. £700 should probably be the mark this hits, but it looks like it'll miss it. £700 I could probably say "Yeah, the premium is probably worth it in the long run", but almost double the price? No way! It needs to be extra special for that much.

You have to be careful ocing the regular 5970, the VRM cooling has not been designed very well and it tends to overheat causing the card to slow itself down.

I doubt the dollar-pound rates are helping much either though.
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Is it worth the price premium over the 5970 in performance terms? No.

Is it an unreasonable price, if it goes for that probably not considering the improvements.

It looks like there will be two versions:

5970 toxic for those who have so much money they dont care. This will have the massive price tag.

5970 for those with slightly less money but can afford to go with high end. This will be a bit more reasonable.
 
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You do realize scaling with a fourth 480 is non existent in games. Its use is for vantage only. ATI has support for Quad xfire in games so yeah it's faster.
 
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I can dream i were all set to get my 5970 till my car broke down now my Bf is QQing over that so it's unlikely i'll get me a new 3d card till christmas.. :(
 
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