News - AMD goes Barts LE to square off with GTX 550 Ti

[HEXUS]

HD 6790 is being oaked to deliver fresh burst of performance.

Read more.

[Jimbo75]

It's a salvaged barts core with higher voltage, that's why it has a 150W TDP. AMD did the same thing with the 5830, remember it had a higher TDP than the 5850 whilst being a lot slower.

In this case, the card should be a bit closer to the 6850 as it still has a full complement of ROP's, which was the big failing of the 5830 (it had halved ROP's).

If it's aggressively priced it could make a decent mid range budget card.

[scaryjim]

Given that the shader core is almost identical to a 5770 it's going to have to hope the ROPs and memory bandwidth make up enough ground: which would then go to show that they mis-engineered the 5750 / 5770 to be back-end bottlenecked. Technologically, I don't see a way this can turn out well for AMD It'll also be interesting to see how it compares to the 6850, since it has less shaders but higher core and memory clocks. It should lose ~ 9% in raw throughput,so it should still be slower, but it looks like it could be pretty close...

Financially it's going to be a tough sell too, as it'll have to slot in somewhere between £110 and £135, landing in GTX460 territory: so it's not just going to have to beat the GTX550, it's going to have to beat those as well. And it's going to have to do it while justifying the premium over the 5770 but without stepping on the 6850s toes. Tricky balancing act...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The power consumption does not look good TBH.

Both the HD5830 1GB and HD6870 1GB have the same number of shaders but the HD5830 runs them at 800MHZ and the HD6870 1GB at 900MHZ. However,the HD6870 has 32 ROPs. The RAM on the HD6870 only runs 50MHZ higher too.

However,the HD6870 1GB is over 30% faster than an HD5830 1GB:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/H...D_6870/29.html

I suspect that the HD6790 1GB will probably be similar in speed to an HD5830 1GB:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/H...D_6850/28.html

[Tarinder]

Something tells me the table isn't quite right.

[EzyRyder]

It is not that difficult to slot in. A 5770 is £80-90, a 6850 £130-£140. Price this at £110-£120 and you will be ok.

I think the 550ti will be the even a more difficult sell ... nVidias midrange is really only sustained by the 460.

[scaryjim]

A 5770 is £80-90

Where from?

You can get 5750s at that price, sure, but the 5770 is nearer £100 - £110 in general, which means the range is a lot smaller: it really has to hit £120 almost smack on the nose to avoid cannibalising the market for one of the other cards...

(ok, a quick search found a powercolor at ebuyer on pre-order for just under £90, but generally my point stands, I think )

[El Juan Pablo]

Yeah 5770 is nearer £100.

HD6850 can be had for £120 delivered if you shop around.

[Repressor]

Well, drivers are released...

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...lypreview.aspx

[El Juan Pablo]

Both cards seem pretty pointless really as the GTX460 can be had for the same price as 550 if you shop around and the 5770 and 6850 can be had for the same or cheaper than this will launch.

Also the 90 moniker on the end is a bit of a cheap trick as thats normally reserved for dual card setups not singles.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It looks like the HD6790 uses the PCB of the HD6870 1GB:

http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/ite...790-pixellized

[EzyRyder]

Where from?

You can get 5750s at that price, sure, but the 5770 is nearer £100 - £110 in general, which means the range is a lot smaller: it really has to hit £120 almost smack on the nose to avoid cannibalising the market for one of the other cards...

(ok, a quick search found a powercolor at ebuyer on pre-order for just under £90, but generally my point stands, I think )

I can see a few in between £90 and a £100 in stock in places such as Pixmania, Aria, LambdaTek and even a couple in stock in Pixmania for under £90.

[Kumagoro]

How about at CCL for £76 VTX3D ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB - VX5770 1GBD5-HV2

http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...513&tid=frooct

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems that card might be decent for overclocking and it might be unlockable too:

http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/ite...at-overclocker

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

There are some benchmarks of the card and some PCB pictures in this thread:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=268686&page=2

It looks like this card will be as fast or faster than a GTX460 768MB.

[Aranthos]

What I don't quite understand is that architecturally this seems to have the same numbers of many components as my 2 year old 4890. For the unenlightened, this means:

800 stream processors
256-bit memory bus
40 texture units

The only thing I can see differs is the fact it has 32 ROP units rather than my 16, as well as the (as far as I understand) fairly minor differences in the overall layout, and individual design of the stream processors.

Why, then, does it take nearly twice as many transistors to manufacture, and on a die only 15% smaller than my 2 year old, 55nm card?