ATI Radeon HD 3870 & 3850: A Return to Competition
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 15, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power Consumption
Dramatically improved is the Radeon HD 3800's power consumption over its predecessor, for obvious reasons. Despite being on a smaller manufacturing process however, the Radeon HD 3870 consumes slightly more power than the GeForce 8800 GT under load. At idle however, the 3800's smaller manufacturing process and new PowerPlay features give it the definite advantage. HTPC users will really appreciate that aspect of the Radeon HD 3800 series power consumption.
Moving to load power use, the difference between the new NVIDIA and AMD offerings is negligible. When you include the fact that the 8800 GT is faster, the Radeon HD 3870 actually has worse performance-per-watt than the competition. Under normal usage (e.g. not in a super hot case), both the 3870 and 3850 ran very quiet. We didn't have time to test how the coolers behaved under high heat conditions.
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Roy2001 - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Well, once I played games with AA enabled, I would never turn it off. I would rather lower the resolution.falacy - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
That's a giant "ME TOO!" for me.my old ATi 9800XT would run 4x AA at 1024x768 in most games and I found that more enjoyable than running 1280x1024 without AA. The 60Hz fliker of the monitor at 1280x1024 played a role in that I am sure, but mostly the trouble with gaming without AA is that objects in the distance tend to shimmer in an unnatural way that seems to pull me out of the moment. So, indeed lower resolution + 4x AA = a better experience than higher resolution that has distracting artifacts.
DrMrLordX - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Alright, thanks. I actually overlooked the AA tests on Oblivion. Silly me.Mostly I was interested in knowing if the 3870 had better results running with 4x AA than the 2900XT. Interestingly enough, the 3870 doesn't seem to lose a lot with 4x AA, especially at high resolutions. The 8800GT is another story.
munky - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
But... I'd like to see more games benchmarked, and with AA preferably.StormRider - Friday, November 16, 2007 - link
Is anyone else bothered by the transistor count of 666 million? Couldn't they have done something so that it was 665 million or 667 million instead?aeternitas - Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - link
lol How stupid. As you go out using this card to obviously kill some sort of opponent, you're bothered by this?Kaleid - Friday, November 23, 2007 - link
Just a number, nothing more to it.