The Radeon HD 4850 & 4870: AMD Wins at $199 and $299
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 25, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power Consumption
NVIDIA's idle power optimizations do a great job of keeping their very power hungry parts sitting pretty when in 2D mode. Many people I know just leave their computers on all day and generally playing games 24 hours a day is not that great for the health. Idle power is important, especially as energy costs rise, and taking steps to ensure that less power is drawn when less power is needed is a great direction to move in. AMD's 4870 hardware is less power friendly, but 4850 is pretty well balanced at idle.
Moving on to load power.
These numbers are peak power draw experienced over multiple runs of 3dmark vantage's third feature test (pixel shaders). This test heavily loads the GPU while being very light on the rest of the system so that we can get as clear a picture of relative GPU power draw as possible. Playing games will incur much higher system level power draw as the CPU, memory, drives and other hardware may also start to hit their own peak power draw at the same time. 4850 and 4870 CrossFire both require large and stable PSUs in order to play actual games.
Clearly the 4870 is a power junky posting the second highest peak power of any card (second only to NVIDIA's GTX 280). While a single 4870 draws more power than the 9800 GX2, quad SLI does peak higher than 4870 crossfire. 4850 power draw is on par with its competitors, but 4850 crossfire does seem to have an advantage in power draw over the 9800 GTX+.
Heat and Noise
These cards get way too hot. I keep burning my hands when I try to swap them out, and Anand seems to enjoy using recently tested 4800 series cards as space heaters. We didn't look at heat data for this article, but our 4850 tests show that things get toasty. And the 4870 gets hugely hot.
The fans are kind of quiet most of the time, but some added noise for less system heat might be a good trade off. Even if it's load, making the rest of a system incredibly hot isn't really the right way to go as other fans will need to work harder and/or components might start to fail.
The noise level of the 4850 fan is alright, but when the 4870 spins up I tend to glance out the window to make sure a jet isn't just about to fly into the building. It's hugely loud at load, but it doesn't get there fast and it doesn't stay there long. It seems AMD favored cooling things down quick and then returning to quiet running.
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paydirt - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
You guys are reading into things WAY too much. Readers understand that just because something is a top performer (right now), doesn't mean that is the appropriate solution for them. Do you honestly think readers are retards and are going to plunk down $1300 for an SLI setup?! Let's leave the uber-rich out of this, get real.So a reader reads the reviews, goes to a shopping site and puts two of these cards in his basket, realizes "woah, hey this is $1300, no way. OK what are my other choices?"
This review doesn't tell people what to do. It's factual. You (the AMD fanbois) are the ones being biased.
Jovec - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
"This fact clearly sets the 4870 in a performance class beyond its price."Or maybe the Nvidia card is priced above its performance class?
DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
it could be both :-)Clauzii - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I think You are right. nVidia had a little too long by themselves, setting prices as seen fit. Now that AMD/ATI are harvesting the fruits of the merger, overcomming the TLB-bug, financial matters (?), etc. etc. it seems the HD48xx series is right where they needed it.This is bound to be a success for them, with so much (tamable) raw power for the price asked.
Clauzii - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Yeah! Nice to see competition get into the game again.gigahertz20 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Page 21 is labeled "Power Consumption, Heat and Noise" in the drop down page box, but it only lists power consumption figures. What about the heat and noise? Is it loud, quiet? What did the temperatures measure at idle and load?abzillah1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I am in love0g1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
"NVIDIA's architecture prefers tons of simple threads (one thread per SP) while AMD's architecture wants instruction heavy threads (since it can work on five instructions from a single thread at once). "Yeah, they both have 10 threads but nV's threads have 24 SP's, AMD's 80 SP's. But the performance will probably be similar because both thread arbiters run about the same speed and nv's SP's run about double the speed, effectively making 48SP's (and in some special cases 96).
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Perhaps it's drivers but if AMD intends for the 4870x2 to compete as the "Fastest Card", they better fix their drivers ASAP.FITCamaro - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
With a few driver revisions it will likely improve.