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Review: Twin-gun AMD R700 aims to blow NVIDIA out of the water

by Tarinder Sandhu on 14 July 2008, 18:41

Tags: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, GeForce GTX 280, AMD (NYSE:AMD), ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Temps, power-draw, overclocking

Temperature musings

We perform our testing in an open test bed, with a 120mm fan simulating case airflow.

Graphics cards AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 1,024MiB Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MiB Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MiB Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2 1,024MiB BFG GeForce GTX 280 1,024MiB ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GX2 1,024MiB XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MiB BFG GeForce 9800 GTX 512MiB
Ambient temperature 24°C 25°C 21°C 19°C 21.5°C 22°C 24°C 21.5°C
Idle temperature 86°C 71°C 71°C 56°C 47°C 60°C 48°C 52.5°C
Load temperature 87°C 83°C 81°C 80°C 74°C 80°C 72°C 67°C
Ambient-to-load delta 63°C 58°C 60°C 61°C 52.5°C 58°C 48°C 45.5°C

The ambient-to-load delta isn't too much of a concern, but the fact that the idle temperature is, for all intents and purposes, identical to the load's is troubling. ATI really needs to fix the card's BIOS before partners ship them out.

Power-draw

Minimising the skew from different platforms, all cards were run on the ATI platform detailed earlier, other than having a different CPU, QX9650, and differing memory, 4GiB DDR3-1,333.

The Canyon test from 3DMark06 was run at 1,920x1,200 with 4xAA and 16xAF.

Graphics cards AMD Radeon HD 4870 X1 1,024MiB Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MiB Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MiB Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2 1,024MiB BFG GeForce GTX 280 1,024MiB ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GX2 1,024MiB XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MiB BFG GeForce 9800 GTX 512MiB
Idle load 242 149 123 119 127 174 N/A 141
Full load 395 229 203 289 279 313 N/A 223

Dear Lord! The idle load of the AMD R700 engineering sample is higher than a Radeon HD 4870 running at full chat, and that's because no PowerPlay management was active on the card. The under-load figure is 120W higher than a GeForce GTX 280's - the draw is the highest we've seen. Confirmation, if it was needed, that the engineering sample we've tested is a real power-hungry mutha!

Indications are that things could change in this area, but if not, then we'll not be impressed on this front. We still believe it likely that you'll need a high-quality, high-wattage PSU to power Radeon HD 4870 X2 when it launches but presently the same is true for all extreme multi-GPU set ups.

Overclocking

No overclocking numbers are provided because, at the time of writing, it wasn't possible to raise the speeds of both cores in a concurrent fashion. We'll look into this as on-going testing.

Wrapping it all up now.