Last fight, it’s the hardest - PowerColor HD5870 review
PowerColor was one of the first to present its products on the Russian market based on the fifth Radeon line. Now, when it remains quite a bit before the announcement of video cards from a competitor, it's time to remember what the PowerColor HD5870 is capable of a few months after the release. The drivers were optimized, the work on the bugs was carried out, it remains to be seen if the current top will be able to repulse Fermi.
On the Internet, there is information that "green video cards" will be 5-10% faster. If this is true, then I will teach you how easy and painlessly you can play this lag to the owners of HD5870 video cards by making a few mouse clicks in the Catalyst Control Center.
')
Many photos. Traffic!
The PowerColor HD5870 video card comes in a compact package. There is a warrior on the front of the package, ready to repel anyone who tries to encroach on the PCI-E slot of the host motherboard. Separately, it is worth noting the fact that only PowerColor presented the fifth lineup of the Radeon with a man, while the rest of the companies favored females. We put a plus sign to designers for originality, but Ruby is already tired.)
On the flip side, we are presented with proprietary AMD technology embedded in the HD5870. For example, ATI Stream Technology, Cross-Fire X Technology, ATI Eyefinity Technology, DirectX11, HDMI. Also presented are the technical characteristics of the video card.
Technical characteristics of the Radeon HD5870:
* Name: Cypress
* Technological process: 40 nm
* Crystal area: 334 square meters. mm
* Number of transistors: 2154 million
* Core frequency: 850 MHz
* Memory bus width: 256 bit
* Memory Type: GDDR5
* Memory frequency: 1200 (4800) MHz
* Memory bandwidth: 153.6 Gb / s
* Memory capacity: 1024 MB
The video card is equipped with a standard turbine, to which all owners of the Radeon lines are probably used to the noise. But on the other hand, such a turbine does an excellent job of cooling the video card.
The video card is powered in two ways: 150W through the PCI-E 2.0 slot, and additional power is provided via two 6-pin connectors.
The turbine, driving the air through all the video card, blows it out with a strong stream through the frame of DVI ports, as well as through special channels on the edge of the video card.
They provide the minimum emission of hot air into the case, which favorably affects the temperature conditions of the system as a whole. The cooling system does not cause any complaints, every detail is thought out.
Holes from the other end of the board, when viewed in a horizontal state, resemble the front part of the American automobile industry autos in the 60s of the twentieth century. Such an air intake immediately makes you feel the power of the card. In fact, it serves to divert hot air from the video card power system.
Test bench:
- Intel Core i7 975 Extreme processor
- cooling system: Xigmatek Achilles
- EVGA X58 Classifield 760 motherboard
- RAM 3x2Gb DDR3 Corsair Dominator GT 2000 MHz CL8
- power supply Enermax Revolution 1250W
- hard disk Seagate 7200.12 500Gb
- operating system: Windows Vista SP1 32bit and Windows 7 64bit
Testing method:
In testing, we used the following benchmarks:
- 3DMark05, default settings
- 3DMark06, default settings
- 3DMark Vantage, default settings,
- Crysis Warhead, 1280x1024, quality Gamer
- FarCry 2, 1280x1024, very high quality
- Heaven 2, DirectX11, 1280x1024 tessellation on / off
The processor was fixed at 4000 MHz, the RAM ran at 1600 MHz.
The video card worked in two modes: with default frequencies - 850/1200 MHz (core / memory), and also at overclocking - 900/1300 MHz (core / memory).
First, let's talk about how you can independently increase your video system performance:
Clicking the right mouse button on the desktop opens a window where we select the Catalyst Control Center. After opening the CCC, go to the ATI OverDrive tab, where by default you will see the above image. Check Enable ATI OverDrive and Enable Manual Fan Control. We set the frequencies to 900 MHz for the core and 1300 MHz for the memory. If almost every sample takes 900 MHz per core easily, then with memory frequencies it can be more difficult. I came across instances that are above 1250 MHz from memory behaved unstably.
I set the fan speed to 60 percent, it's not as noisy as at the maximum, and it cope with the cooling of the overclocked card. We now turn to the test results.
Results:
In 3DMark05, the results were quite high. The test was released five years ago and is not able to fully load the video card. If you increase the frequency of the processor, the result will be even higher.
Even in 3DMark06 the situation is similar. There is not enough processor frequency to reveal the potential of the video card.
But in 3DMark Vantage the potential of the red-black monster is already fully manifested. 20,000 parrots on a video card with 1GPU, who would have believed it six months ago? Separately, it is worth noting the work and programmers AMD. Six months later, to conquer the 20k line in Vantage, 100 MHz less core is required. At the time of the announcement for 20k, it was necessary to overclock the video card to 1000/1300 MHz.
The situation in real gaming applications is such that the overclocking potential of a video card allows you to eliminate the “advantage” that Fermi products should provide.
In FarCry2 there is no such strong load as in Crysis, therefore, the difference from overclocking turns out to be larger at first glance.
Heaven 2, having appeared on the Internet a few days ago, literally blew up the public with a new level of graphics. Tessellation very heavily loads the video card, and the developers of the benchmark rely on it.
In real games, I think that tessellation blocks will not be used so much that it will keep high fps even in heavy scenes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is worth noting that the PowerColor product turned out to be excellent and does not cause any complaints. Many video card manufacturers presented their versions of the Radeon HD5870 with factory overclocking. But why pay more if PowerColor also offers for less money? I think the answer is unequivocal.
The OCClub.ru team awards the PowerColor HD5870 product the Our Choice Award
On the Internet, there is information that "green video cards" will be 5-10% faster. If this is true, then I will teach you how easy and painlessly you can play this lag to the owners of HD5870 video cards by making a few mouse clicks in the Catalyst Control Center.
')
Many photos. Traffic!
The PowerColor HD5870 video card comes in a compact package. There is a warrior on the front of the package, ready to repel anyone who tries to encroach on the PCI-E slot of the host motherboard. Separately, it is worth noting the fact that only PowerColor presented the fifth lineup of the Radeon with a man, while the rest of the companies favored females. We put a plus sign to designers for originality, but Ruby is already tired.)
On the flip side, we are presented with proprietary AMD technology embedded in the HD5870. For example, ATI Stream Technology, Cross-Fire X Technology, ATI Eyefinity Technology, DirectX11, HDMI. Also presented are the technical characteristics of the video card.
Technical characteristics of the Radeon HD5870:
* Name: Cypress
* Technological process: 40 nm
* Crystal area: 334 square meters. mm
* Number of transistors: 2154 million
* Core frequency: 850 MHz
* Memory bus width: 256 bit
* Memory Type: GDDR5
* Memory frequency: 1200 (4800) MHz
* Memory bandwidth: 153.6 Gb / s
* Memory capacity: 1024 MB
The video card is equipped with a standard turbine, to which all owners of the Radeon lines are probably used to the noise. But on the other hand, such a turbine does an excellent job of cooling the video card.
The video card is powered in two ways: 150W through the PCI-E 2.0 slot, and additional power is provided via two 6-pin connectors.
The turbine, driving the air through all the video card, blows it out with a strong stream through the frame of DVI ports, as well as through special channels on the edge of the video card.
They provide the minimum emission of hot air into the case, which favorably affects the temperature conditions of the system as a whole. The cooling system does not cause any complaints, every detail is thought out.
Holes from the other end of the board, when viewed in a horizontal state, resemble the front part of the American automobile industry autos in the 60s of the twentieth century. Such an air intake immediately makes you feel the power of the card. In fact, it serves to divert hot air from the video card power system.
Test bench:
- Intel Core i7 975 Extreme processor
- cooling system: Xigmatek Achilles
- EVGA X58 Classifield 760 motherboard
- RAM 3x2Gb DDR3 Corsair Dominator GT 2000 MHz CL8
- power supply Enermax Revolution 1250W
- hard disk Seagate 7200.12 500Gb
- operating system: Windows Vista SP1 32bit and Windows 7 64bit
Testing method:
In testing, we used the following benchmarks:
- 3DMark05, default settings
- 3DMark06, default settings
- 3DMark Vantage, default settings,
- Crysis Warhead, 1280x1024, quality Gamer
- FarCry 2, 1280x1024, very high quality
- Heaven 2, DirectX11, 1280x1024 tessellation on / off
The processor was fixed at 4000 MHz, the RAM ran at 1600 MHz.
The video card worked in two modes: with default frequencies - 850/1200 MHz (core / memory), and also at overclocking - 900/1300 MHz (core / memory).
First, let's talk about how you can independently increase your video system performance:
Clicking the right mouse button on the desktop opens a window where we select the Catalyst Control Center. After opening the CCC, go to the ATI OverDrive tab, where by default you will see the above image. Check Enable ATI OverDrive and Enable Manual Fan Control. We set the frequencies to 900 MHz for the core and 1300 MHz for the memory. If almost every sample takes 900 MHz per core easily, then with memory frequencies it can be more difficult. I came across instances that are above 1250 MHz from memory behaved unstably.
I set the fan speed to 60 percent, it's not as noisy as at the maximum, and it cope with the cooling of the overclocked card. We now turn to the test results.
Results:
In 3DMark05, the results were quite high. The test was released five years ago and is not able to fully load the video card. If you increase the frequency of the processor, the result will be even higher.
Even in 3DMark06 the situation is similar. There is not enough processor frequency to reveal the potential of the video card.
But in 3DMark Vantage the potential of the red-black monster is already fully manifested. 20,000 parrots on a video card with 1GPU, who would have believed it six months ago? Separately, it is worth noting the work and programmers AMD. Six months later, to conquer the 20k line in Vantage, 100 MHz less core is required. At the time of the announcement for 20k, it was necessary to overclock the video card to 1000/1300 MHz.
The situation in real gaming applications is such that the overclocking potential of a video card allows you to eliminate the “advantage” that Fermi products should provide.
In FarCry2 there is no such strong load as in Crysis, therefore, the difference from overclocking turns out to be larger at first glance.
Heaven 2, having appeared on the Internet a few days ago, literally blew up the public with a new level of graphics. Tessellation very heavily loads the video card, and the developers of the benchmark rely on it.
In real games, I think that tessellation blocks will not be used so much that it will keep high fps even in heavy scenes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is worth noting that the PowerColor product turned out to be excellent and does not cause any complaints. Many video card manufacturers presented their versions of the Radeon HD5870 with factory overclocking. But why pay more if PowerColor also offers for less money? I think the answer is unequivocal.
The OCClub.ru team awards the PowerColor HD5870 product the Our Choice Award
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/88902/
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