Asus Voltage Tweaks Radeon HD 5870 To A 38% Performance Boost

[Xoulz]

no, overclocking to 1ghz is the ambition, and it isnt as good as 5870 but the power within the card is enough even if 1ghz isnt reached.
Price/performance its really attractive for me.

Bah.. for $369 bucks..?

We are enthusiasts here, you already know that the 5850 is gimped to begin with..., why OC that?

Personally I'm grabbing the 5870 2GB and when the X2's come out, I'll be buying that too. Slap both on MSI's "BIG BANG"... I'm thinking this should be an utter retard gaming board! (5870 2gb + 5870x2 4gb on HYDRA)

[Farinorco]

What I find more surprising is the memory clocks. So you can overclock the memory in the HD5850 to the same clocks that the memory in the HD5870 can reach? Are they using the same memory chips or what? Why then the stock HD5850 uses that memory at 4000MHz when HD5870 at 4800MHz? Only because HD5850 is cheaper so it has to be slower?

Now, if both cards reach the same memory clocks (5200MHz), the HD5850 is becoming a more than interesting option. A core clock of 945MHz would compensate the lack of 10% of the SPs and TUs, giving the exact same shading and texturing power than a stock HD5870 but with more rasterizing (ROPs are the same so a higher clock would be more). So at this point (944/4800) it would be slightly better than a stock HD5870. It seems you can go further (1050/5200), allowing a HD5850 to have an ~10% performance more than a stock HD5870...

In fact, if both cards can overclock to the same clocks both core and memory, the only practical difference between the two is a 10% extra shading and texture units in the HD5870, hardly worth the difference in money (33%+ extra)

I would like to know if it's true that memories in HD5850 reach 5200MHz, the same that HD5870 ones.

[zalbard]

What I find more surprising is the memory clocks. So you can overclock the memory in the HD5850 to the same clocks that the memory in the HD5870 can reach? Are they using the same memory chips or what? Why then the stock HD5850 uses that memory at 4000MHz when HD5870 at 4800MHz? Only because HD5850 is cheaper so it has to be slower?

Now, if both cards reach the same memory clocks (5200MHz), the HD5850 is becoming a more than interesting option. A core clock of 945MHz would compensate the lack of 10% of the SPs and TUs, giving the exact same shading and texturing power than a stock HD5870 but with more rasterizing (ROPs are the same so a higher clock would be more). So at this point (944/4800) it would be slightly better than a stock HD5870. It seems you can go further (1050/5200), allowing a HD5850 to have an ~10% performance more than a stock HD5870...

In fact, if both cards can overclock to the same clocks both core and memory, the only practical difference between the two is a 10% extra shading and texture units in the HD5870, hardly worth the difference in money (33%+ extra)

I would like to know if it's true that memories in HD5850 reach 5200MHz, the same that HD5870 ones.

Yep, same.