Some home-done 4890 results

[Oversized Rooster]

I thought I would share some home-made results with respect to the 4890.

My brief system setup info:

Intel Q9450 @ 3.6GHz
Asus P5Q-E Mobo
8GB DDR2-1066 OCZ Reaper RAM
300GB WD VelociRaptor
640GB WD Caviar Black
640GB WD Caviar Black
500GB WD Caviar Blue
1GB Sapphire 4890 @ 950/4300
750W PCP&C Silencer PSU
Antec 1200 Case w/ 5 x 120mm fans + 250mm top fan

In performance mode for 3DMark Vantage, I got about 12500 points. In 3DMark 2006 I got just under 19000 points.

The default fan speed on this card was 50% which is so loud you will go deaf. 20% is the minimum that CCC allows. Anywhere between 20 and 25% fan speed, you will not hear the 4890. At 30% there is the sound of rushing air. Anything past 30% fan speed makes a whining noise, louder and louder.

At 20% fan speed, the card idles at about 70 and loads at 85. At 25% fan speed it idles at about 60 and loads at 80. Therefore, there is a good reason why ATI decided to make the default fan speed 50%. Someone has also stated that ATI recommends keeping the fan at 100% for overclocking. That is obviously not needed...but you may want to invest in an aftermarket cooler.

I'm going to buy an Arctic Cooling Twin Turbo cooler next week for the card so I can silence and cool it better. I had one of those coolers on my old 512MB 4870 and it did wonders there.

I had to use the Catalyst 9.4 beta drivers because 9.3 and below don't support the 4890 while the drivers supplied on my Sapphire disk went nuts. Well, the drivers worked but, the CCC get into an infinite loop of trying to load on startup, self-closing, and then self-trying to open again.

Any other results guys? Any thoughts? Questions?

[aviduser]

Just wondering what your vantage/3dmark scores were with your old 4870, if you remember.

Those seem like really good scores for a single gpu

[bojangles]

They are pretty good yes, considering it doesn't include PhysX.

[Oversized Rooster]

I don't think I ever benched with my old 4870 actually.

But I do have some results from last summer with dual 4850 cards.

I ran the same system back then, but the CPU was OCed to 3.8GHz additionally.

A single 4850 did 14500 in 3DMark 2006 while two of them in CF did 20500.

A single 4850 card did 7000 in Vantage. Dual 4850 cards did 10300 in Vantage Performance mode. The 4850 scores were done with Catalyst 8.10 drivers in October.

Therefore, this means a single 4890 card is faster than dual 4850 cards in Vantage. Holy cow - good going ATI! :)

I am not crazy. I checked this Tweaktown review and their numbers were similar to mine. So indeed 1 x 4890 > 2 x 4850 for Vantage.

Radeon HD 4850 In Crossfire at 4GHz Benchmarks - 3DMark Vantage :: TweakTown

[IRQ Conflict]

Well, my 4890 maxes out at around 930Mhz core. I got just over 17,000 3DMark 06 and ~10,000 Vantage performance mode. Q6600@ 3.2Ghz.

But yeah. It is one sweet card. I think the faster the CPU the higher the overall score will be. So I think the SM 2.0/3.0 score should best be compared no?

[neilvan]

I must be doing something wrong it my system?

My 3DMark Vantage Advanced score was 11250 or right around there.

My system is:

i7 920 @ 3.4GHz w/Noctua NH-U12P
MSI x58 Pro
12GB Patriot Extreme Viper DDR3-1333
xfx 4890 at stock speed
WD 640GB 'Black' drive for my OS and apps.
Several other larger fast 'black' drives for storage
PC P&C 750W Silencer PSU
Coolermaster Cosmos case, two 120mm top fans, one 120mm rear exhaust, one 120mm bottom intake fan, one Noctua 120mm fan for the hard drives
Vista HP 64-bit

[anthonee1230]

3DMark is pretty heavily CPU weighted actually.

[Oversized Rooster]

Originally Posted by anthonee1230

3DMark is pretty heavily CPU weighted actually.

Well then why isn't the guy with the Corei7 beating my score? His CPU is superior to my Core 2 Quad...

[IRQ Conflict]

3.6 Ghz vs. 3.4 Ghz and my scores are even lower at 3.2 Ghz.

As the poster stated, 3DMark is heavily CPU weighted. Therefore to gauge actual GPU performance I think we should be paying less attention to the overall score and more to the GPU SM 2/3 stuff.

I may be wrong, but it looks that way. I'm going to take vantage for another spin. This time I'll shut down some background stuff and see if I can't get a better score.

[anthonee1230]

Originally Posted by Oversized Rooster

Well then why isn't the guy with the Corei7 beating my score? His CPU is superior to my Core 2 Quad...

Don't know about his particular score considering 'Advanced' isn't even a performance preset in 3DMark Vantage.