facebook rss twitter

Review: Sapphire AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB

by Tarinder Sandhu on 12 August 2008, 05:00

Tags: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire, ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaosq

Add to My Vault: x

Temps, overclocking, power-draw

 

Temperature musings

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

Graphics cards Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB PowerColor HD Radeon 4850 512MB BFG GTX 280 1GB EVGA GTX 260 896 MB BFG GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
Ambient temperature 24°C
23.5°C 25°C 21.5°C
23°C 23.5°C
Idle temperature 73°C
78°C 77°C 47°C 53°C 53°C
Load temperature 95°C 90°C 82°C 74°C 71°C 67°C
Ambient-to-load delta 71°C 66.5°C 57°C 52.5°C 48°C 43.5°C


Radeon HD 4800-series' idle and load temperatures remain a concern, idling, as they do, significantly higher than the NVIDIA GPUs. We have to wonder just what effect the elevated temps will have on longevity; only time will tell.

Power-draw

Graphics cards Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB PowerColor HD Radeon 4850 512MB BFG GTX 280 1GB EVGA GTX 260 896 MB BFG GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
Idle draw 149W
141W 106W 107W
103W 114W
Load draw 366W
216W 175W 260W 227W 194W



Measuring power-draw at the mains by running 3DMark06's Canyon test at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF, we see the X2 consume over 100W more than any other card. However, we imagine that the card wil be idle most of the time and, as such, the 149W power-draw is actually pretty good.

Overclocking

AMD chose not to increase the frequecies of the dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2 when compared with the regular card - a move away from the HD 3870 X2.

We managed to raise default clocks (750/750/3,600MHz) to 775/775/3,826MHz comfortably enough, and it added 2.5 per cent to the average framerate at 1,920x1,200 in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - from 101.63fps to 104.07fps average.