The AMD Radeon HD 5850 accelerator was officially introduced in September 2009. The technical specifications of this accelerator made it possible to implement any software-intensive tasks. Therefore, it was usually used only as part of the most productive computer systems. The latter could be safely attributed gaming computers or various graphic stations. But in the market of computer component parts of a device based on it, it was possible to meet only at the beginning of winter. It is this graphic adapter that will be discussed below.
Positioning
The graphics accelerators of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 Series line were considered by the manufacturer to be high-performance devices. That is, they were intended to solve the most resource-intensive tasks. Therefore, such adapters were most often seen as part of gaming computers in 2009β2010. Also, such computer components were quite successfully used in elementary-class graphic stations. In all other cases, such an accelerator was impractical to use. It had a rather high cost, and its resources were not fully utilized in the implementation of less costly tasks. Therefore, there was no particular economic sense in overpaying to a potential owner of a personal computer for something that he could not fully use in the process of work.
Equipment
The accelerator delivery list for this model most often included the following elements:
- Discrete accelerator with installed cooling system.
- Company coupon with warranty from the manufacturer, the validity of which is one year from the date of purchase of the computer component.
- An optical drive with drivers, software utilities and documentation recorded on it.
- A set of adapters for creating configurations from several accelerators and organizing an additional power supply system.
- Graphic subsystem manual.
In some cases, the previous list was supplemented by auction cards, which allowed certain games to be purchased at substantial discounts.
Microprocessor specifications
The AMD Radeon HD 5850 graphics accelerator was based on the RV870 chip, codenamed Cypress. This semiconductor crystal was manufactured using technology with a tolerance of 40 nm and included 2,154,000,000 different transistor elements. Unfortunately, its semiconductor components were manufactured using surface-mounted technology, and they are currently out of date. Now all semiconductor crystals are already produced in volumetric design.
The composition of the chip included 1440 stream processors, 32 rasterization units and 72 TMU modules. All these elements of the graphics subsystem in nominal mode worked at a clock frequency of 725 MHz. In the case of a simpler task, the last value could automatically decrease significantly.
At the software level, AMD developers have implemented many useful technologies in this adapter. The first one is Turbo GPU rev. 2.0. With its help, the accelerator could, as noted earlier, significantly reduce the clock frequency and power consumption. Another important feature of this device is the support of an API such as DirectX version 11.0. If it was maintained at the software level, this would increase PC performance.
RAM Characteristics
The characteristics of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 indicated that in combination with this microprocessor only microcircuits of the GDDR5 format could function. The manufacturer recommended equipping such devices with 1 GB of video buffer, but some manufacturers reduced the amount of RAM to 512 MB in order to save. The frequency of RAM in this case was equal to 4000 MHz. It is also worth noting that moment that the width of the bus connecting the RAM of the graphics accelerator was equal to 256 bits. As a result, the throughput of RAM was 128 Gb / s.
Accelerator Performance
The AMD Radeon HD 5850 graphics card boasted a very high level of performance. In the test utility 3DMark '06, this adapter was able to successfully score 20,250 points. According to this indicator, it is slightly inferior to the device HD5870, which was able to score 21262 points. But at the same time, the accelerator was able to get around devices such as HD 4890 (17489 points), GTX 275 (18265 points) and even GTX 285 (18532 points).
A similar alignment of forces is observed in the Crisys toy. In this case, the accelerators were able to produce such fps:
- HD5870 - 95.
- HD5850 - 81.
- GTX 285 - 70.
- GTX 275 - 69.
- HD 4890 - 68.
Reviews
Among the advantages of AMD Radeon HD 5850, experts included high performance at the time of the start of sales, support for API DirectX version 11 and reliability. To the minuses, one could include overpriced energy consumption and cost. Now, the list of shortcomings has been supplemented by outdated architecture, which underlies the accelerator in question.
Conclusion
Really top-end accelerator at the time of the release was AMD Radeon HD 5850. This adapter allowed us to solve any actual tasks by the standards of 2009. But now this accelerator is out of date, and computers based on it need urgent modernization.