The Radeon HD 4870 1GB: The Card to Get
by Derek Wilson on September 25, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power
There really isn't much to say about power that hasn't already been said about the 4870. It still draws a significant amount more power at idle and load than the GTX 260. The interesting thing is just how little difference going from 512MB to 1GB of RAM makes in terms of power. The two 4870s come in at just about the same power draw in both idle and load tests.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
I would hope that someday soon AMD will address this with drivers or something... but seriously they dropped the ball here. I mean, 4850 and 4870 are the same GPU, so the only difference is clock speed and voltages. You can't expect me to believe that in this day and age they can't get clock and voltage adjustments to work on-the-fly. A BIOS flash can work it seems, but that just begs the question: why wasn't the BIOS programmed "properly" in the first place? (Possibly they discovered in testing that there were problems with the different voltages?) Users should *NOT* have to flash a GPU BIOS for stuff like proper power saving.Finally - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
Hmm. You are the test-guy. You should know (and tell us, please! :p)@HD4870vs.HD4850: You forgot 1 thing: the HD4870 has GDDR5, but the HD4850 has GDDR3. As it has been proven, this makes a big difference. So you can't say that they are the same. GDDR5 seems to be much more undervolting and power-saving-friendly.
Spoelie - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
Could you check with ATi if powerplay (down throttling clockspeed *and* voltage) is in the pipeline for a future driver release?I've been hearing forum voices saying "it's in the next release" for quite some time now.
Jedi2155 - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
In higher resolutions, I think this is a reality.I think the article is very truthful and quite a few other sites and come to back this up.
There is a problem with the frame buffer at higher resolutions and settings, especially if you understand how anti-aliasing among other things work.
Use Rivatuner to check the memory usage on the frame buffer yourself at those resolutions....
NullSubroutine - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
I don't have a problem with them using 8.7 for the 4870, far as I have last heard its a great driver for that card. But that is a horrible driver to use for the 4870 X2. While it wasn't the card being looked at, it can skew the results if you are trying to decide which card to get.Tiamat - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
Page 2:512MB -> 1024MB is a 100% improvement (i.e. double the ram) not 50% improvement. 50% improvement would have been to 768MB ram.
DerekWilson - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
heh ... you are quite right. sorry about that. i'll fix this.Spoelie - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
Power consumption: "Significantly" more in *both* idle and load?idle yes, load no
DerekWilson - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
by significant i mean the differences is not negligibleDiosjenin - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
I was rather under the impression that the 1GB per/2GB total RAM on the 4870 X2 was generally the reason it could be found in many cases to scale better than two 4870s, since the latter option included only 512MB per/1GB total RAM.Now that we have 4870s with 1GB RAM, can you stick two of them together and do a 2x 4870 1GB vs 4870 X2 comparison to see how that can affect the scaling disparities we've seen there before?