Double charge. Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 video card testing

Just a couple of months ago we admired AMD Radeon HD 5870 – And now we are testing her double version, a new flagship, Radeon HD 5970. Exact information about the board appeared in early December, then the first samples of this monster came out in the West. For a long time no one brought anything to Russia, but we got the first working sample Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 , which we will talk about now.

As usual

There is nothing new in Radeon HD 5970, this is a logical continuation of the series. AMD says the HD 5970 is worth a new crystal, Hemlock , Before us is just a double set of processors CyPress , who came here with HD 5870 – we have already seen this by example Radeon HD 4870 X2 And HD 3870 x2. Just crystals choose the best: low leakage currents, high stability. To make a double card, the manufacturer puts a couple of video cards on one piece of textolite and connects them with each other with a special internal bridge PCIe 2.1 x16. It turns out the real Crossfire-tie, which occupies only one PCIe X16 slot in the computer. Many will say that this is not enough for two powerful video cards: there is not enough throughput. But if we recall that the standard for the average chipsets is the X8+X8 work scheme, and the full -fledged X16+X16 is put only on expensive motherboards, then there is no difference.

The main problem of double video cards is the restriction on energy consumption. If one HD 5870 eats 187 watts each, then 374 watts are spent on two such chips, and this does not climb into any gates, because not every house has a power supply for 1000 watts with a pair of eight -consumed forks. Hence the first losses.

The first losses

CyPress frequencies were reduced to the level of Radeon HD 5850. It turns out that the processors operate at a frequency of 725 MHz instead of the set 850 MHz. In addition, the memory has lost 800 MHz and is now communicating with CyPress on 4000 MHz – all this has reduced the gluttony of HD 5970 from the predicted 374 to 294 watts.

Despite the fact that the frequencies have decreased, everything else remains as it was. In total, 4.3 billion transistors are responsible for the graphics – these are 40 SIMD blocks, 3200 stream processors, 160 texture and 64 of the rasterization unit. Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 operates at standard frequencies and is equipped with 2 GB GDDR5. Technology support – DirectX 11 And Ati Eyefinity – In place.

In general, the reduction of frequencies to the level of the Radeon HD 5850 is a harsh necessity, CyPress processors should easily accelerate to standard 850 MHz. So if you have a powerful 1000 W power supply and a case with high -quality ventilation, you can safely raise the frequencies of Radeon HD 5970 to nominal, the processors will withstand the processors.

It is difficult to understand from photographs how the flagship differs from Radeon HD 5870. Everything seems to be the same: a large red-black cooler, one fan, decorative “exhaust pipes” from behind. The only thing you can see is the absence of HDMI and DisplayPort. Instead, two DVI and one Mini DiplayPort were placed, due to which it was possible to free a whole slot for the removal of hot air.

But what is not visible in the photographs is the dimensions of the card. Next to her even GeForce GTX 285 It seems to be a card for htpc – it is shorter by 3.5 cm. Just think, AMD Radeon HD 5970 does not fit in the standard Middle Tower case, it will have to buy Full Tower – no less! Two forks are needed to power the board-6-pin and 8-pin.

Three brothers and Crossfire

With the release of Radeon HD 5970, AMD programmers had to urgently solve the problem with ATI Eyefinity technology. Until today, she did not work on Crossfire, which was sad, because the huge resolution of three monitors was very demanding on resources. As a result, AMD did not turn off the main technology on the flagship model: the drivers have seriously shaken, and now Eyefinity works on Crossfire systems. True, the list of supported games is limited to two dozen.

Terrible beginning

For tests of such a monster, we collected the corresponding system. On the motherboard MSI X58 Platinum Put Core i7 920 , dispersed from 2.66 to 3.4 GHz, so that the system worked stably, equipped it with a powerful cooler Cooler Master N620. Three planks were put to help Kingston Hyperx DDR3-1600 2 GB each. And finally, Radeon HD 5970. Unfortunately, there was no body of the desired size at hand and we had to test it on an open stand Cooler Master Lab Test Bench v.1.0. Everything was eaten from 850 watts of the block OCZ.

We decided to conduct tests under the control of Windows Vista 64-bit. To evaluate performance, they used 3DMark06 , Crysis , Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood , Resident Evil 5 And Devil May Cry 4. All graphics settings were set at the maximum and the minimum resolution chose 1680×1050 with AF 16X and AA 4X on.

Not all tests went smoothly. The first stage of testing with a bang failed due to raw drivers 8.66 RC8 beta. Crysis launched after time and far from all permissions. After suffering, we requested the most fresh drivers in AMD – not yet released at that time Catalyst 9.12. It was possible to complete the tests on it, however, Crysis still refused to work in 1920×1080, AF 16X, AA 8 X and issued a black screen.

The results were interesting. In Crysis, the new flagship broke away from Radeon HD 5870 by 8-10 frames per second. In some Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood, performance growth has reached 65% – 50 frames more than other cards! In Devil May Cry 4, we received plus 70-95 fps. But in the Resident Evil 5 tests turned out to be similar.

* * *

It is too early to judge the performance of AMD Radeon HD 5970. The drivers are now very raw, the number of personnel in the games jumps, and the test results are ambiguous. But we’ll say one thing today for sure: Radeon HD 5970 is really the fastest video card in the world. Officially, it costs about 18,000 rubles (although it was sold at the end of December 25-35,000), which is about 5,000 more expensive GeForce GTX 295. Of course, this is a lot, but after the purchase of such a video card about the update, you can forget for the next one and a half to two years.

Table 1
Technical characteristics
Sapphire Radeon HD 5970PowerColor Radeon HD 5870geForce GTX 295
The core HemlocktyPressgt200b
Cosmobet sister sites
The number of transistors 4.3 billion2.15 billion2x 1.4 billion
Process process 40-nm40-nm55-nm
The number of stream processors 2x 160016002x 240
The frequency of the graphic nucleus 725 MHz850 MHz576 MHz
Frequency of stream processors 725 MHz850 MHz1242 MHz
Type, memory volume GDDR 5, 2 GBGDDR5, 1 GBGDDR3, 1792 MB
Memory frequency 4000 MHz4800 MHz1998 MHz
Data tire 256 bits256 bit448 bits
The number of texture blocks 2x 80802x 80
The number of rasterization blocks 2x 32322x 28
Interface PCIE 2.0 x16pcie 2.0 x16pcie 2.0 x16
Price (for December 2009) from 18,000 rubles with 12,000 rubles with 14,500 rubles
Table 2
Synthetic tests
3DMark06
SM2.0SM3.0cpuoverall
Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 65519832476518484
PowerColor Radeon HD 5870 66788362476617 300
GeForce GTX 295 65219063476317 784
Table 3
Game tests
Sapphire Radeon HD 5970PowerColor Radeon HD 5870geForce GTX 295
Crysis 1.2.1
High, 1680×1050, AA 4X, AF 16X 58.76 5051.34
High, 1920×1080, AA 4X, AF 16X 57.82 45,8745.02
High, 1680×1050, AA 8x, AF X16x52.26 54.86 49
High, 1920×1080, AA 8X, AF 16X – 47.8 44.34
Devil May Cry 4 (SC2)
1680×1050, AA 4X, AF 16X 233.8 148,06197.9
1680×1050, AA 8X, AF 16X 207.97 140,46165,13
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
1680×1050, AA 4X, AF 16×62.2 72 44.3
1920×1080, AA 4X, AF 16X 109.2 67,160.1
1680×1050, AA 8X, AF 16X 122.7 70.353.1
1920×1080, AA 8X, AF 16X56 65.7 54.3
Resident Evil 5
1680×1050, AA 4X, AF 16×100.6 101.8 93.5
1920×1080, AA 4X, AF 16X 98.8 98,291.8
1680×1050, AA 8X, AF 16X 99 96,293.9
1920×1080, AA 8X, AF 16×95.4 95.5 90.6