ATI Radeon HD 5870 Mac Edition vs GeForce 8400 GS

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Primary details

GPU architecture, market segment, value for money and other general parameters compared.

Place in the ranking1256not rated
Place by popularitynot in top-100not in top-100
Power efficiency0.69no data
ArchitectureTesla (2006−2010)TeraScale 2 (2009−2015)
GPU code nameG86Cypress
Market segmentDesktopDesktop
Release date17 April 2007 (17 years ago)30 June 2010 (14 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)$29.99 $479

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores161600
Core clock speed459 MHz850 MHz
Number of transistors210 million2,154 million
Manufacturing process technology80 nm40 nm
Power consumption (TDP)40 Watt228 Watt
Texture fill rate3.67268.00
Floating-point processing power0.02938 TFLOPS2.72 TFLOPS
ROPs432
TMUs880

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

InterfacePCIe 1.0 x16PCIe 2.0 x16
Length170 mm279 mm
Width1-slot2-slot
Supplementary power connectorsNone2x 6-pin
SLI options+-

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory typeDDR2GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount256 MB1 GB
Standard memory config per GPU256 MBno data
Memory bus width64 Bit256 Bit
Memory clock speed400 MHz1195 MHz
Memory bandwidth6.4 GB/s153.0 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors1x DVI, 1x VGA, 1x S-Video1x DVI, 2x mini-DisplayPort

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX11.1 (10_0)11.2 (11_0)
Shader Model4.05.0
OpenGL2.14.4
OpenCL1.11.2
VulkanN/AN/A
CUDA1.1-

Pros & cons summary


Recency 17 April 2007 30 June 2010
Maximum RAM amount 256 MB 1 GB
Chip lithography 80 nm 40 nm
Power consumption (TDP) 40 Watt 228 Watt

8400 GS has 470% lower power consumption.

ATI HD 5870 Mac Edition, on the other hand, has an age advantage of 3 years, a 300% higher maximum VRAM amount, and a 100% more advanced lithography process.

We couldn't decide between GeForce 8400 GS and Radeon HD 5870 Mac Edition. We've got no test results to judge.


Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.

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NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS
GeForce 8400 GS
ATI Radeon HD 5870 Mac Edition
Radeon HD 5870 Mac Edition

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Community ratings

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