The Radeon HD 5970: Completing AMD's Takeover of the High End GPU Market
by Ryan Smith on November 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Thanks to AMD’s aggressive power optimizations, the idle power of the 5970 is rated for 42W. In practice this puts it within spitting distance of the 5800 series in Crossfire, and below a number of other cards including the GTX 295, 4870X2, and even the 4870 itself.
Once we start looking at load power, we find our interesting story. Remember that the 5970 is specifically built and binned in order to meet the 300W cap. As a result it offers 5850CF performance, but at 21W lower power usage, and the gap only increases as you move up the chart with more powerful cards in SLI/CF mode. The converse of this is that it flirts with the cap more than our GTX 295, and as a result comes in 69W higher. But since we’re using OCCT, any driver throttling needs to be taken in to consideration.
Looking at the 5970 when it’s overclocked, it becomes readily apparently why a good power supply is necessary. For that 15% increase in core speed and 20% increase in memory speed, we pay a penalty of 113W! This puts it in league with the GTX series in SLI, and the 5870CF, except that it’s drawing all of this power over half as many plugs. We’re only going to say this one more time: if you’re going to overclock the 5970, you must have a very good power supply.
Moving on, the vapor chamber cooler makes itself felt in our temperature testing. The 5970 is the coolest high-end card we’ve tested (yes, you’ve read that right), coming in at 38C, below even the GTS 250. This is in stark opposition to previous dual-GPU cards, which have inhabited the top of the chart. Even the 5850 isn’t quite as cool as a 5970 at idle.
At load, we see a similar but slightly different story. It’s no longer the coolest card, losing out to the likes of the 5850 and GTX 285, but at 85C it hangs with the GTX 275, and below other single and dual-GPU cards such as the 5870 and GTX 295. This is a combination of the vapor cooler, and the fact that AMD slapped an oversized cooler on this card for overclocking purposes. Although Anand’s card failed at OCCT when overclocked, my own card hit 93C here, so assume that this cool advantage erodes under overclocking.
Finally we have our look at noise. Realistically, every card runs up against the noise floor, and the 5970 is no different. At 38C idle, it can keep its fan at very low speeds.
It’s at load that we find another interesting story. At 63.8dB it’s plenty loud, but it’s still quieter than either the GTX 295 or 5870CF, the former of which it is significantly faster than. Given the power numbers we saw earlier, we had been expecting something that registered as louder, so this was a pleasant surprise.
We will add that on a subjective basis, AMD seems to have done something to keep the whine down. The GTX 295 (and 4870X2) aren’t just loud, but they have a slight whine to them – the 5970 does not. This means that it’s not just a bit quieter to sound meters, but it really comes across that way to human ears too. But by the same token, I would consider the 5850CF to quieter still, more so than 2dB would imply.
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tcube - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Well my thought is that if amd would release this card on SOI/HK-MG in 32/28nm MCM config at 4 GHz it would leave nvidia wondering what it did to deserve it. And I wonder ... why the heck not? These cards would be business-grade-able and with a decent silicon they could ask for enormous prices. Plus they could probably stick the entire thing in dual config on one single card (possibly within the 300 W pcie v2 limit)... that would be a 40-50 Tflops card and with the new GDDR5(5ghz +) it should qualify as a damn monster. I would also expect a ~2-3k$ per such beast but I think its worth it. 50Tf/card, 6cards/server... 3Pflop/cabinet... hrm... well...it wouldn't be fair to compair it to general purpose supercomputers... buuut you could deffinatelly ray trace render avatar directly into HD4x 3d in realtime and probably make it look even better in the process...srikar115 - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
i agree with this reveiw ,here a complete summary i found is also intrestinghttp://pcgamersera.com/2009/12/ati-radeon-5970-rev...">http://pcgamersera.com/2009/12/ati-radeon-5970-rev...
srikar115 - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 - link
http://pcgamersera.com/ati-radeon-5970-review-suma...xpclient - Friday, November 27, 2009 - link
What no test to check video performance/DXVA? DirectX 11/WDDM 1.1 introduced DXVA HD (Accelerated HD/Blu-Ray playback).cmdrdredd - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Clearly nobody buying this card is going to put Crysis on "Gamer Quality" They'll put it on the max it can go. Why is AT still the only tech site in the whole world who is using "Gamer quality" with a card that has enough power to run a small town?AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Why does the 5970 get <= 5850 CF performance, when it has 3200 Stream Processors vs 2880?araczynski - Saturday, November 21, 2009 - link
i look forward to buying this, in a few years.JonnyDough - Friday, November 20, 2009 - link
why they didn't just call it the 5880.Paladin1211 - Friday, November 20, 2009 - link
Ryan,I'm a professional L4D player, and I know the Source engine gives out very high frame rate on today cards. The test become silly because there is no different at all from 60 to 300+ fps. So, it all comes down to min fps.
I suggest that you record a demo in map 5 Dead Air, with 4 Survivors defend with their back onto the limit line of the position of the first crashed plane. The main player for the record will be vomitted on by boomer, another throws pipe bomb near him, another throws molotov near him also. Full force of zombies (only 30), 2 hunters, 1 smoker, 1 tank attacking. (When a player become a tank, the boss he's controlling become a bot, and still attacking the survivors).
This is the heaviest practical scene in L4D, and it just makes sense for the benchmark. You dont really need 8 players to arrange the scene, I think using cheats is much easier.
I know it will take time to re-benchmark all of those cards for the new scene, but I think it wont be too much. Even if you cant do this, please reply me.
Thank you :)
SunSamurai - Friday, November 20, 2009 - link
You're not professional FPS player if you think there is no difference between 60 and 300fps.