Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 2GB OC Edition Review

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Extreme IQ Settings Testing

Extreme IQ Settings Testing

In this section we take a number of games we have tested previously in this review and bring things to the next level with additional AA and / or higher detail settings. All other methodologies remain the same.

 

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PCI-E x8 Performance Scaling

PCI-E x8 Performance Scaling

Many people ask us about the performance of today’s best cards in situations where the usual x16 PCI-E 2.0 bandwidth isn’t available. There are also plenty of older but no less capable P35 boards still being used that use the older PCI-E Gen1 slots whose x16 bandwidth roughly equals that of an x8 PCI-E 2.0 slot.

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In this section we will be using the bottom x8 PCI-E 2.0 slot (x8 electrical / x16 physical) on the same Gigabyte EX58 UD5 motherboard used for all other testing. We will be running the same GPU-intensive tests as in the Extreme IQ Settings testing.

So what does this all mean? It seems that in certain cases, the lower bandwidth provided by a 2.0 PCI-E interface running at x8 or a PCI-E 1.1 slot running at x16 will bottleneck this card ALOT. In other situations where the card isn’t rendering for all its worth, there is still some performance loss but not as much. As such, if you are running an older board or hope to run two of these cards in Crossfire on a P55 / P45 board you should be aware that you will not be getting optimum performance.

 

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Heat & Acoustics / Power Consumption

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.

ATI made a big deal about binning cores for efficiency and it seems this worked quite well for them considering the temperatures we saw throughout testing. Indeed, these are some of the lowest temperatures we have seen when testing a dual GPU card.

Amazingly enough, these low temperatures weren’t the result of extremely high fan speeds since the HD 5970 never made much noise. Its fan did spin up from time to time and made itself noticeable but its acoustical footprint pales in comparison to what we experienced with the HD 4870 X2.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.

The efficiency and performance per watt of the ATI’s latest cards has never been in question and the HD 5970 does nothing but reinforce that point. Even though its idle power consumption is slightly higher than a pair of HD 5850 1GB cards, the real eye-opener is how much power it needs when under load. It really is amazing to see a card that can almost compete on a level footing with two HD 5850 cards consume about 20W less.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

There is simply no denying that the HD 5970 is a ridiculously fast card with heaps of performance and loads of potential. It can finally be said that ATI has wrested the ultra high end single card performance crown away from NVIDIA and has done so without a real challenger in sight. It is so fast in fact that other than using it for some Eyefinity goodness; we really don’t know what application will ever take advantage of the insane amounts of rendering power it brings to the table. With the PC gaming world becoming increasingly tied at the hip to console games that don’t even cause last-gen GPUs to break a sweat, it could come to pass that ATI’s follow-up cards will be released long before the HD 5970 is ever really put to the test. You will also notice very little mention of NVIDIA in this conclusion because...well, they just don't have anything a this point that can compete with this thing.

Even though it can lay claim to the title of the fastest card in the world, the HD 5970’s overall performance reads like a history of inconsistency. If we wouldn’t have popped the HD 5850 Crossfire results into the charts at the last minute, this card would have looked unbeatable. As it stands, both solutions perform within spitting distance of one another but the HD 5970 struggles in high-resolution, high AA DX10 situations. In those cases it’s scaling just can’t compete with a pair HD 5850 1GB cards. That being said, I am sure some people will blame this shortfall on the perennial whipping boy named Drivers. But seriously, I’m done blaming drivers on performance missteps within games that were released over 6 months ago and which ATI had damn well enough time to prepare for. We could probably fill another page up with musing about what’s going on here but let’s just say this drop in performance in two out of three DX10 apps doesn’t bode well for DX11 performance.

Keeping with the inconsistencies we have seen is the usual issue that comes up with every dual GPU card on the face of the planet: performance is very much tied to Crossfire / SLI profiles. Once again we see the Crossfire is simply not working in Call of Juarez and Dawn of War. Remember, these are older games which goes to show your new $600 card may perform about equally to an overclocked HD 5850 in some cases. This also means gamers will be sitting around waiting for profiles to be released whenever a new game comes out that wasn’t previously supported. Yes, we know it isn’t an optimal situation but this is what you buy into with any multi GPU configuration.

Performance aside, there is one thing that really bothers us about the HD 5970: the fact it is being released when stocks of HD 5800-series cards are nonexistent. This is a slap in the face for not only the customers waiting weeks upon weeks for their HD 5870 or HD 5850 but also to their vendors and board partners who have been crying bloody murder in a pointless effort for additional HD 5800 allocation. The cores are desperately needed to fill backorders and the competition isn’t even a speck on the horizon. However, we are convinced that ATI would rather have waiting lists a mile long than loose face by pushing back a launch date. I understand the need to capitalize on holiday season sales but if there are no cards in the channel because your company is insisting on stretching supplies too thinly, sales will suffer anyways.

The two $600 solutions are now able to compete against each other but regardless of paper specifications, this race is dead even. The HD 5970 has slightly better load efficiency, great overclocking potential and will appeal to people with a single x16 PCI-E 2.0 slot on their motherboards. On the flip side of the coin, the dual HD 5850 solution somehow provides much better scaling at higher resolutions and consumes slightly less power when performing 2D operations. Which should you choose? That’s up to you but it really seems the HD 5970 leaves the door wide open for ATI to answer with a higher clocked version if NVIDIA’s Fermi is able to put up a fight for the performance crown.


Pros:

- Insane performance for a single PCB card
- Efficient
- Relatively quiet
- Runs quite cool
- Great package by Sapphire


Cons:

- Disappointing high resolution DX10 performance
- Missing Crossfire profiles in some games
- Very limited availability
- May not fit into your case
- Expensive
- “Overclock” is nothing but window dressing

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