Probable specs of Radeon HD 5870

Surfing on net I have found this....http://games.tiscali.cz/news/news.asp?id=32685
It is Czech gamer website but quite honest concerning games/hardware information. I made "working" translation to English. Concerning price...it will be definitely less than 380 USD, prices in USA are always lower than in Europe. If price info is true I would guess no more than 300 USD (and maybe even less)...lucky you and poor us

and now promised translation:

Probable specification of Radeon HD 5870

After release of the Radeon HD 4770 couple of days before, which became new king of price/performance ratio, everybody is looking at new generation of ATI Radeon graphics cards, which will be based on ATI core RV870. This should be, similarly as RV740 alias Radeon HD 4770, produced on 40nm technology. This (RV7410) has still problems (majority of the chips are defected), but it should be solved in course of couple of weeks.

Going back to new promised specification of RV870, this should be “only” new evolution of contemporary chip RV770 (HD4850/4870) and RV790 (HD 4890), which are actually coming from two years old RV670 (HD 38x0). When compared to current chips, number of unified shaders was increased from 800 to 1200, core clock to 900 Mhz (from 750 Mhz in case of HD 4870 and 850 in case of HD 4890). Number of rendering units (ROPs) was also doubled (from 16 to 32) and number of texturing units increased from 40 to 48.

On the other side any changes in memory system. ATI will continue with combination of 256bit bus and 1Gg DDR5 memory on clock speed 4.4 Ghz (3.6 Ghz in HD 4870/4890). Memory bandwidth should jump up from 115 to 141 GB/s. System of smaller bus and faster memory is ATI choice for two main reasons. Surface of new core should be comparable to older RV770 what means lower production costs and more chips on wafer. Second reason is sinking price of DDR5 memory.

Maybe specs of new core does not seem to be very high but let’s go to look at them closer. Number of shaders will be more by half, frequency of core (clock) compared to HD 4870 about 20%. Pure calculating performance should increase about 60%. Moreover higher memory bandwidth and more ROPs and TMUs. Rough calculation of on-going HD 5870 - 50-60% more compared to HD 4870 and 35% compared to HD 4890 and that´s not bad at all (HD 5870 should outperform HD 4870x2 and it should be only 10% slower than GTX 295). Of course bear on the mind DX 11 support.

Last outstanding question concern price and date of release. We can only speculate about price, but HD 5870 alike its predecessor might have similar starting price. In case of HD 4870 the price was 6000 CZK but because USD went up new price might be around 7500 CZK (fyi 380 USD). Date of release…rumors said that in July but that does not seem to be true, more probably end of September. It might be delighting that high-end two chip version HD 5870x2 should follow soon. So good times are coming but do not forget that all specs could be changed and our information are not confirmed absolutely.