4870 Benchmarks

[Mehen]

http://en.expreview.com/2008/06/24/first-review-hd-4870-and-hd-4850/5/

haven't even read em yet, figured I'd post right away though...

[Jammrock]

Site...buckling...under...hit explosion...

[Mehen]

So it looks like the HD4870 is ~GTX 260, but probably more like $300-330 instead of $400 for the GTX 260.
The HD4870X2 should be interesting, probably enough to take away the performance crown from the GTX280 for single slot solutions.

Too bad I hate the Catalyst Control Centre.

I should also note that the 4xxx series runs HOT! And that overclocked cards will be on their way soon, but don't expect much.

ATI seems to have released some decent cards here - but only because the NV ones are more expensive - not because the ATI ones are superior.

[Evildead666]

They run hot because of the coolers.
Once the cooler has been changed, BINGO!!!!!
i'm just gonna wait a little while longer, until the X2 before i make my purchase...
I left ATi after my 9800Pro, but i'm really glad to be going back...

The ATi cards are superior in their efficiency, and performance/$.
Two 4870's for the price of a GTX280 is very good...

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/725-4/dossier-amd-radeon-hd-4870-4850.html

Check out the pictures of the memory at the bottom.
Notice how the GDDR5 on the right, the traces are now straight, and there is no longer any need to do squiggly traces on the PCb to keep them the same length...
This drastically reduces board usage and complexity...

edit : once i replaced the original cooler on my 9500pro, for an Artic Cooling VGA Silencer (block of Al ) the core went from 275MHz to 400MHz, not volt mods or whatever...Good times are coming back...
edit2: i also put it on an old GeForce 2 Pro 64Mb, and it went from 166MHz to over 300...

[Mehen]

Hrm... so tempting to go crossfire, especially with this X48 board...
Running 1280x1024 though... 9600GT will be ok until I get a 24" LCD (maybe boxing day, or next summer).

I'll be building a Nehalem based computer for my brother when they are available... maybe a 4870X2 for that...

[Evildead666]

Ah...i'm currently running 22" 1680x1050.
I run all games at native resolution, and even got to play Crysis at over 20fps with nearly everything on very high, in xp...it was a push though...
With this quad, compared to my Pentium D @4.7GHz, the graphics card is quite a bit smoother...and that little bit faster...

Gonna be building a HTPC for my parents with a 4850, so better get to the drawing board and select some components...will prob open a thread in the HTPC forum...

[Evildead666]

Piccies of the R700 are out and about, with the new PLX PCIe splitter chip...
This has 48 PCIe lanes, 16 for each of the GPU's and 16 for the actual PCIe interface on the mobo.
The new PLX chip is smaller than the older one, and has a very slight more latency, 110ns for the previous, 140ns for this one.

Apparently, this will be a shared memory design, and should be quite faster than two 4870's in crossfire...
In all expectancy, this will beat GTX280, possibly even in a SLi configuration...we'll just have to wait ...

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=294649

p.s. wish Nv would hurry up and come out with a PhysX driver for 8800GTS, so i can bench this card some more...

[Evildead666]

Meh, apparently, the R700 still uses a 2x256bit interface for the memory, so I can't see it being shared memory this time round...

http://www.tomshardware.tw/596,news-596.html

Also the fact they have 2Gb of memory (2x1Gb each...) seems to point to non-shared memory. They would really only need 1Gb if the memory was shared between the two chips...