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
The Test
For the 5970 launch, AMD is launching the card with a special set of drivers based on the Catalyst 9.10 branch, version 8.663.1. These drivers have had a lot of work put in to their Crossfire abilities, both to enable Crossfire Eyefinity support on the 5970, and to improve overall Crossfire performance. The Crossfire performance improvement also cascades down to the 5800 series, where we’ve seen CF performance improve in Crysis and Dawn of War II, while we’ve seen Resident Evil 5 performance dip some. So we’ve rerun our 5850CF and 5870CF numbers with the new drivers an updated them accordingly; single card performance remains unaffected.
Also, for most of these games we’ve gone ahead and dropped all resolutions besides 2560. Crysis is the only game that even remotely struggles with the 5970 (and less so thanks to these drivers). Everything else gets 60fps or more at 2560.
Finally, we’ve gone ahead and benchmarked the 5970 at both stock at overclocked 5870 (850MHz/1200Mhz) speeds. Bear in mind that we did encounter VRM throttling at 5870 speeds however.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
ATI Radeon HD 5970 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
It's possible, but the 850TX is a very well regarded unit. If it can't run a 5970 overclocked, then I surmise that a lot of buyers are going to run in to the same problem. I don't have another comparable power supply on hand, so this isn't something I can test with my card.Anand has a 1K unit, and of course you know how his turned out.
To be frank, we likely would have never noticed the throttling issue if it wasn't for the Distributed.net client. It's only after realizing that it was underperforming by about 10-20% that I decided to watch the Overdrive pane and saw it bouncing around. These guys could be throttling too, and just not realize it.
Silverforce11 - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Seems iffy then since most reviews put it at 900 core and 5ghz + on the ram, with only a modest overvolt to 1.16. I would think ATI wouldnt bother putting in 3 high quality VRM and japanese capacitors if they didnt test it thoroughly at the specs they wanted it to OC at.My old PSU is the bigger bro of this guy being the 750 ver.
http://anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?...">http://anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?...
And had issues with the 4870x2. Got a better "single rail" PSU and it ran fine n OC well.
Silverforce11 - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
ATI went all out with building these 5970, the components are top notch. The chips are the best of the bunch. I'm surprised they did this, as they are essentially selling you 2x 5870 performance (IF your PSU is good) at $599 when 2x 5870 CF would cost $800. They have no competitor in the top, why do they not price this card higher or why even bother putting in quality parts to almost guarantee 5870 clocks?I believe its ATI's last nail on the nV coffin and they hammered it really hard.
ET - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Too much discussion about adapters for the mini-displayport. The 27" iMac has such an input port and a resolution of 2560 x 1440, and it seems a sin to not test them together. (Not that I'm blaming Anandtech or anything, since I'm sure it's not that easy to get the iMac for testing.)Taft12 - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Why would they bother using a computer with attached monitor and instead use the larger, higher-res and CHEAPER Dell 3008WFP?Raqia - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Look at all the finger print smudges on the nice card! I've started to notice the hand models that corporations use to hold their products. The hands holding the ipods on the apple site? Flawless, perfect nails and cuticles. Same w/ the fingers grasping the Magny Cours chip.NullSubroutine - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Hilbert @ Guru3d got the overclocking working with 900Mhz core speed (though it reached 90c).http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5970-revie...">http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5970-revie...
I was impressed with some of the crossfire benchmarks actually showing improvement. If Eyeinfinity works with 5970 does it work with the card in crossfire?
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Bear in mind that it also took him 1.3v to get there; the AMD tool doesn't go that high. With my card, I strongly suspect the issue is the VRMs, so more voltage wouldn't help.And I'm still trying to get an answer to the Eyefinity + 5970CF question. The boys and girls at AMD went home for the night before we realized we didn't have an answer to that.
Lennie - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
I thought everyone knew about Furmark and ATi by now. It used to be like this on 4870 series too.It went like this, at first there were few reports of 4870(X2) cards dying when running Furmak. Further investigation showed that it was indeed Furmark causing VRM's to heat up to insane levels and eventually killing them. Word reached ATi from that point on ATi intentionally throttles their card when detecting Furmark to prevent the damage.
Yeah in fact the amount of heat load Furmak puts on VRMs is unrealistic and no game is able to heat up the VRMs to the level Furmark does. OCCT used the same method (or maybe even integrated Furmark) to test for stability (in their own opinion ofc)
So beware about Furmark and OCCT if you have HD4K or 5K.
The term "Hardware Virus" is rightfully applicable to Furmark when it comes to HD4K (and 5K perhaps)
strikeback03 - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
The article stated that they encountered throttling in real games, not Furmark.