so in my XFX uh 5850 unboxing what I
realized is that I didn't really go into enough depth about what are the
differences between these two cards so first let's talk about the physical
differences okay the most obvious one is the difference in length so we're going
to measure the 5870 from the very edge of the PCI
bracket here to the end of the cart is 11 oh it's like 11 and 1/8 of an inch
and then for the 5850 the same measurement is only N9 and a oh just a
hair over a half so it's about 9 and you know 5/8 of an inch okay but something
that you have to factor in is that you're going to need almost another inch
or so maybe 3/4 of an inch for the PCI
Express connector so it actually is more like more like 10 and 1 half so you're
only looking at about a 1 in difference between these two cards when they're
installed in your case now they both support direct X11 and they both support
ifinity with up to three monitors One DisplayPort and two other digital
displays now in terms of the overall spec I'm going to cheat a little bit
here and I'm going to look at the chart on Hardware conu because it's very very
useful so the 5870 is clocked at 850 MHz
on the GPU core and the 5850 is clocked at 725 the 5870 has faster memory at 4.8
GHz whereas the 5850 is clocked at 4,000
so just 4 GHz there are a couple other
differences for example the Stream processors are down from 1600 stream
processors to 1440 and then you're also
a little bit reduced on the rops okay or sorry the texture units the
RS are the same so what that means is
that with the 5850 based on all the benchmarks I've seen I haven't had a
chance to test it yet you're looking at about 10 to 15% slower but at a
significant cost reduction so thank you for checking out my differences between
the 5870 and the 5850 video