Published: Wednesday 23rd September, 2009 | Author: Parm Mann
Companies: ASUSTeK (All ASUSTeK content)
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email to a friendIf you've been browsing through retailers today looking at the Radeon HD 5000-series cards on offer, you may not have noticed that ASUS' cards are a little more unique than most of the competition as they're equipped with what the Taiwanese manufacturer calls Voltage Tweak Technology.
Voltage Tweak Technology, controlled by ASUS' own SmartDoctor software, allows users to increase a card's GPU voltage, leading to a boost in GPU and memory frequencies.
We've yet to test it for ourselves on AMD's latest cards, but the figures we're being quoted are impressive. According to ASUS, its Radeon HD 5870 can have its voltage raised from 1,15V to 1,35V, resulting in a GPU clock speed bump from 850MHz to 1,035MHz and a rise in memory speed from 4,800MHz to 5,200MHz. That's essentially the fastest single-GPU graphics card made faster, and we reckon those figures may give an indication of Radeon HD 5890 performance.
For those wanting to save a few pennies, ASUS' Voltage Tweak-packing Radeon HD 5850 can raise voltage from 1.088V to 1.4V. That'll increase GPU clock speed from 725MHz to 1,050MHz and memory clock speed from 4,000MHz to 5,200MHz.
We'll have to take ASUS' word for it, but those are impressive figures - and we're told the Voltage Tweak'd Radeon HD 5870 provides a 38 per cent boost in 3DMark Vantage.
As with most other Radeon HD 5000-series cards, ASUS' offerings will ship with a coupon for Colin McRae: DiRT 2. That coupon should prove to be useful when the PC version of the game launches sometime later this year.
Official press release: ASUS Launches World’s First EAH5800 Series Graphics Cards with Voltage Tweak Technology for up to a 38% Performance Upgrade
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Agree that it is testimonial to 5890. Who knows if it'll use 6gbps GDDR5 (probably), but I wouldn't be surprised to see it use 1.3v, just like 4890. Since they quote 1035mhz, normalizing it, 1.3v/1ghz sounds about right for 5890...at around 215W.
That is, of course, if there isn't another revision of the chip ala rv790...which the rumor mill suggests there will be. It's been mentioned (Czech Gamer) if G300 launches this year, ATi will lower prices to compete. If it launches next year, AMD will respond with a new revision and an according x2 part (5890x2) to battle the corresponding G300/gx2 parts.
Getting back to this, it looks like ASUS is really being quite fair with the voltage options...Both would end up (1.35 on 5870, 1.4 on 5850) right at the cusp of 225W, the max allowed (at least by spec) to the power connectors. Bravo. Bring on the bios so everyone can flash theirs just like before... :)Quote
You can overclock and tweak a GPU all you like, but at some point you run out of voltage, power or cooling. This at least removes one of those problems.
Tee hee... wait for the price to drop then 4 of the 5870s in CFX with an i7 975 on H2O. (I wish)
Mmmmmmm....Quote
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