ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - R700 Preview: AMD's Fastest Single Card
by Derek Wilson on July 14, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power Heat and Noise
This is prerelease hardware and software, so we can't really go in depth on these issues until we have something more final. We were told that idle power is not what it will be and so not to test it at all. We did, however look at load power.
As for heat, this card doesn't get any hotter to the touch than a single 4870. The HSF is much heavier than either 4870 or 3870 X2, and is very likely the reason the heat doesn't stay in the system.
Hot surface
On the noise front, when gaming it does spin up, but it isn't any louder than the GTX 280 at max fan speed. Again, we'll want to wait until we have final hardware to do quantitative tests on this, but it is nice to see that even the prerelease hardware doesn't go crazy in terms of heat and noise.
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docmilo - Wednesday, July 16, 2008 - link
This hotfix is a new set of drivers for the 4800 series. I installed them last night on my 4850 and when I run the Overdrive I reach 700mhz on the gpu stable.docmilo - Wednesday, July 16, 2008 - link
Well the link didn't work. Here's the address:http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?dep...">http://support.ati.com/ics/support/defa...mp;task=...
Lerianis - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
They probably haven't released a new driver for these cards yet and expect you to use the driver they include on the disk with the card. Wait until next month, they will most likely finally have a driver on their website for these cards.alzg22 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
They do have drivers, Catalyst 8.6 introduced support for the 4800 series. It's just not listed under the driver finder, probably.bob4432 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
i think they are referring to a driver that changes the fan speed so you don't cook the 4850/4870s....KikassAssassin - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
You can do that now by creating an Overdrive profile in the control center, and editing the profile's file (Documents/username/AppData/Local/ATI/ACE/profilename.xml) in Notepad. There's a line in there for fan speed that you can edit. I set mine to 40% (up from the default 20%) and idle temps on my 4870 dropped from about 75C to 45C, and load temps dropped from about 95C to about 65C. 40% fan speed was right about at the upper limit I could set it to before the fan noise became annoying (the thing seriously sounds like a freaking jet engine at max speed).It'd be nice if they'd add an option to change the fan speed in the control center, though.
sc3252 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
This card is hot for a $500 video card. I cant wait to pick one up. Two questions I have. Does it actually share the memory or is it separate? Did they fix the stutter associated with Crossfire?DerekWilson - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
oh yeah, and we're going to wait until the card actually comes out to look at things like micro-stutter etc...DerekWilson - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
memory is not shared. shared framebuffer won't come out for a while yet apparently ...each GPU has a separate 512MB framebuffer.
LeftSide - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Hardopc is saying their card has 2gigs, 1gig per core. Are there 2 versions of this card?