When it comes to hardware specifications as such, you can expect that Radeon 5600 series will pack equal amount of 3D power as the current high-end series - according to Chiphell, RV830 GPU consists out of allegeldy 800 shader units, 40 Texture Memory Units [TMU], 16 Rasterizing Operands [ROP] and these pictures confirm the 128-bit memory controller.
Pictures courtesy of Chiphell
But what makes this part special is the number of outputs. ATI's Evergreen family comes with support for four display connectors, that being some combination between DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI. We've seen RV830 and RV870-based boards, and they all feature better connectivity than the previous generation.
There's a caveat, though. When nVidia released Quadro CX and FX4800, the boards came with two DisplayPort connectors and a dual-link DVI. In BSN* studio, we use Quadro FX4800 board connected to two Dell 2408WFP displays while the DVI connector is occupied by our DVI-to-HDMI adapter, connecting to a 46" Panasonic plasma TV [used for coloring]. So far, not a single ATI card manages to pass this test in a single card output.
Now, ATI recently released FirePro V8750 2GB, everything was fine and dandy, and ATI replicated the display connectivity - two DisplayPorts, one DVI. But, ATI FirePro does not support triple-display output.
With the RV830 e.g. Radeon 5600 pictured in detail with four connectors: two DVI-I, single DisplayPort and Single HDMI, we can only hope that Evergreen GPU supports connectivity to at least three displays, and four - if we're really lucky.
Seeing this level of connectivity on a mainstream card only makes us wonder to what effect Taiwanese beer had on ATI's engineers back in June 2007 at the Evergreen Laurel hotel, when ATI Evergreen got its name?
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