largon braught up a good point in the other thread just now... 870 is a big gpu and 40nm yields are far from perfect... they cant throw away bad parts, and the next lower part they could use these gpus for is juniper with 800sps... thats a lot lower... so it makes sense if the 5850 is actually lower in specs and has less sps and maybe even other blocks disabled... 1200sps should be enough tp beat the 285 easily and gives them enough headroom to get even notably damaged rv870 cores sold without losing a lot of money on them...