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Radeon HD 5830 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

The Radeon HD 5830 has core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be a small bit better than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 25600 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be a lot (approximately 79%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830 44800 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 35200 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830 12800 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 19200 (150%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

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Radeon HD 5830

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7870

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Display Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5830 Radeon HD 7870
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year February 25, 2010 March 2012
Code Name Cypress LE Pitcairn XT
Memory 1024 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 800 MHz 1000 MHz
Memory Speed 4000 MHz 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 175 watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 128000 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 44800 Mtexels/sec 80000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 12800 Mpixels/sec 32000 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1120(224x5) 1280
Texture Mapping Units 56 80
Render Output Units 16 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Transistors 2154 million 2800 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5830

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7870

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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