Hd5870 - $299

[saaya]

I jumped differently... Ti 4200, X850XT, 8800 GTS 640, HD4870 ... HD5870?

i went:
Rage 128pro (first vga, lol... has a weird L shape pcb and was such a cheap pos... terrible drivers, terribly slow...
Rage 128 fury MAXX (first ati, and i think first ever, dual gpu card still got it, what a collectors item hehe)
Geforce 256 DDR... wow... (my sec fav vga until today)
Geforce TNT2 ultra... sounded awesome, but it sucked...
Gainward G2MX400 Vivo golden sample... awesome multimedia card, clocked very well...
Kyro2 interesting but... meh... nothing special
Gainward G4MX golden sample... wow... this card did the highest percentage ocs i ever saw, over 100% gpu oc and mem clocked to 700 iirc, i could play far cry with really nice image quality at acceptable fps
8500LE@8500 ->
4200@4600 ->
9500np@9700pro (my fav vga until today ) ->
6600GT special edition from leadtek... hated this card so much... terrible driver optimizations and overheating at stock (oced) gpu... ->
X850XT PE(! ) ->
X850 xfire master edition + x850XT PE xfire ->
1600PRO Xfire ->
1950PRO ->
3850@3870 ->
3850@3870 + 3870 Xfire ->
gigabyte GTS250 SLi/ msi GTX260 SLi ...
i like the GTS250 cards from gigabyte... small, cheap, very powerful, the heatsink blocks the sli bridge though, really stupid
the 260s seem to huge and heavy and not worth the power they consume and extra money they cost for benching sure... but playing games? almost no diference between 250s and 260s...

ok, enough OT

My guess is HD5850 is a crippled HD5870 with few SP and TMU units disabled. Something like 32RBE/64TMU/1280SP (16 SIMDs), maybe even some RBEs and buswidth cut off. Bigger die -> harvesting is a must.

mhhhh so then 5850=1280 sps? or maybe flat 1200? hmmmm that would be interesting... and yes, lots of holes on the 40nm wafers+big die... and the next step down is 800sps... thats too low for damaged parts... good point!

that would also explain the large price diference between 5850 and 5870!

5870x2 499$
5870 399$
5850 299$
5830 199$

sounds too simple somehow? but this is pretty much what it sounds like so far