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5850 vs 5870 - My Results & Opinions

Great thread! :)

As my brother has a 5850, i was wondering whether the overclocking was done on the stock cooler?

If not what's a good after market cooler for the card to overclock? Will VRM temperature be an issue as with the 4xxx series? Any suggestions/advice?

Thanks!

(To the above poster: Yes, only in shader heavy games will 5870 shine.)
 
SpudMaster said:
Out of interest what volts does your 5850 need to run at 1100/1300? I run my 5870 at 1000/1300 with 1.2v. But even when using 1.35v with msi afterburner i cant get it stable at 1100/1300
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1.3v for 1100. However I have a full water block which may make the difference as your lack of stability could be down the gpu or vrm's getting too hot.

Also mine is a 5850 and as shown takes less volts for the same clock as a 5870.

Also every card is different to yours may not be capable of doing 1100/1300 at whatever voltage/cooling.

Very interested to see in the Heaven benchmark that clock per clock the 5870 is only 1% faster. For people who are going to overclock, the 5870 really is a bad buy. It was similar wiht Nvidiaamd gtx260 55nm 216SP. Overclocked this was faster than a stock gtx285 and they were great overclockers. Since the gtx285 was almost double the money, if you wanted to spend that kind of money, two gtx260 in SLI was the way forward.
 
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Greebo said:
Very interested to see in the Heaven benchmark that clock per clock the 5870 is only 1% faster. For people who are going to overclock, the 5870 really is a bad buy. It was similar wiht Nvidiaamd gtx260 55nm 216SP. Overclocked this was faster than a stock gtx285 and they were great overclockers. Since the gtx285 was almost double the money, if you wanted to spend that kind of money, two gtx260 in SLI was the way forward.
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This is an interesting observation. I was suprised by how close the HD5870 and HD5850 are in the Unique heaven benchmark (as I assume its quite shader heavy).

I can only conclude that the tessellation unit is identical in each card* (clocked the same as the core) and hence the major DX11 point of this benchmark (tessellation) shows no iprovement from the HD5850 to the HD5870 (at the same clocks) because the hardware is literally the same.

*This seems logical going by the block diagrams for each card.

I must admit the only reason(s) I got the HD5870 over the HD5850 is that for the most part I run cards at the stock frequencies (or factory overclocked frequencies) hence a HD5870 is noticably faster in this instance (I went from GTX260-SLI so the performance drop to a HD5870 was less pronounced than a HD5850). I also got the HD5870 at a great price so I am not complaining.
 
The first two tests within 3DMark Vantage (Jane Nash & New Calico) seem to provide a good indication of true 5850 vs 5870 performance, when both cards are clocked at the same speeds.

The individual fill & texture tests show where the additional cores on the 5870 make noticeable differences. Texture Fill, Pixel Shader and Perlin Noise all scale exactly with the number of active shader cores. The remaining tests show no real advantage.

No game is solely dependent on Shader performance, and limiting factors may be found within one or more other elements of GPU and/or memory architectire. Crysis is probably the most shader intensive game currently available, and even there overall performance gains are only 5%. I doubt any game will ever show a clear 10% difference at the same clock speeds. Only benchmarks which isolate particular areas (such as the three Vantage tests) are able to show this.

I think this proves that both 58xx cards are "shader monsters", and that any weak points (bottlenecks) will likely appear within other areas.
 
pzr vr6 said:
how do i clock a 5850 past 775 1125??
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Currenty just two manufacturers (ASUS & MSI) produce 58xx cards with a BIOS that allows cards to clock past CCC defaults. If you do not own one of these cards you will need to flash the BIOS (to ASUS or MSI) in order to unleash the beast. This will likely void your cards warranty. There are plenty of guides available via Google.
 
This is a great post 555BUK. I too have owned both cards but decided that the 5850 just didnt "wow" me so I ordered a 5870. The 5870 performed noticeably better than the 5850 (without overclocking so not surprising) but as i was using it for Eyefinity i wanted that little bit extra in case for some reason i got a bad clocker - those extra shaders come in handy at higher resolutions too.

Ur review is a fine comparison showing if u are willing to mod the bios and dont want to spend the extra for the top part, the 5850 is the way to go :cool:
 
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555BUK said:
5850 @ 925/1200 clocks 42.3fps
5870 @ 925/1250 clocks 43.4fps
difference 1.03%
*attempted bench at 1250mem for my 5850 crashed during test 10. Mem clocks left at 1200.
*5850 benched on Win7 64, 5870 on Vista 64. This may contribute to the small differences.
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why didn't you do 925/1200 on the 5870?
 
gareth170 said:
why didn't you do 925/1200 on the 5870?
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I no longer own the 5870. oweneades ran the benchmark at 925/1250 on his (my old) 5870, but unfortunately my 5850 cannot match his memory clocks. Memory clocks seem to make little real difference within the Heaven benchmark, so 925/1200 vs 925/1250 will still be pretty accurate. If oweneades is still reading this thread perhaps he will run a bench 925/1200 for me.
 
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