A Look At Triple-GPU Performance And Multi-GPU Scaling, Part 1
by Ryan Smith on April 3, 2011 7:00 AM ESTThe Test, Power, Temps, and Noise
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3x2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 EVGA GeForce GTX 590 Classified NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Zotac GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 266.58 AMD Catalyst 11.4 Preview |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
With that out of the way, let’s start our look at power, temperature, and noise. We did include our jury-rigged triple-CF setup in these results for the sake of a comparison point, but please keep in mind that we’re not using a viable long-term setup, which is why we have starred the results. These results also include the GTX 590 from last week, which has its own handicap under FurMark due to NVIDIA’s OCP. This does not apply to the triple SLI setup, which we can bypass OCP on.
Given NVIDIA’s higher idle TDP, there shouldn’t be any surprises here. Three GTX 580s in SLI makes for a fairly wide gap of 37W – in fact even two GTX 580s in SLI is still 7W more than the triple 6970 setup. Multi-GPU configurations are always going to be a limited market opportunity, but if it were possible to completely power down unused GPUs, it would certainly improve the idle numbers.
With up to three GPUs, power consumption under load gets understandably high. For FurMark in particular we see the triple GTX 580 setup come just shy of 1200W due to our disabling of OCP – it’s an amusingly absurd number. Meanwhile the triple 6970 setup picks up almost nothing over the dual 6970, which is clearly a result of AMD’s drivers not having a 3-way CF profile for FurMark. Thus the greatest power load we can place on the triple 6970 is under HAWX, where it pulls 835W.
With three cards packed tightly together the middle card ends up having the most difficult time, so it’s that card which is setting the highest temperatures here. Even with that, idle temperatures only tick up a couple of degrees in a triple-GPU configuration.
Even when we forcibly wedge the 6970s apart, the triple 6970 setup still ends up being the warmest under Crysis – this being after Crysis temperatures dropped 9C from the separation. Meanwhile the triple GTX 580 gets quite warm on its own, but under Crysis and HAWX it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. FurMark is the only outlier here, where temperatures stabilized at 95C, 2C under GF110’s thermal threshold. It’s safe, but I wouldn’t recommend running FurMark all day just to prove it.
With a 3rd card in the mix idle noise creeps up some, but much like idle temperatures it’s not significantly more. For some perspective though, we’re still looking at idle noise levels equivalent to the GTX 560 Ti running FurMark, so it’s by no means a silent operation.
It turns out adding a 3rd card doesn’t make all that much more noise. Under HAWX the GTX 580 does get 3dB louder, but under FurMark the difference is under a dB. The triple 6970 setup does better under both situations, but that has more to do with our jury-rigging and the fact that FurMark doesn’t scale with a 3rd AMD GPU. Amusingly the triple 580 setup is still quieter under FurMark than the 6990 by nearly 3dB even though we’ve disabled OCP for the GTX 580, and for HAWX the difference is only .2dB in AMD’s favor. It’s simply not possible to do worse than the 6990 without overvolting/overclocking, it seems.
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DanNeely - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
Does DNetc not have 4xx/5xx nVidia applications yet?Pirks - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
They have CUDA 3.1 clients that work pretty nice with Fermi cards. Except that AMD cards pwn them violently, we're talking about an order of magnitude difference between 'em. Somehow RC5-72 code executes 10x faster on AMD than on nVidia GPUs, I could never find precise explanation why, must be related to poor match between RC5 algorithm and nVidia GPU architecture or something.I crack RC5-72 keys on my AMD 5850 and it's amost 2 BILLION keys per second. Out of 86,000+ participants my machine is ranked #43 from the top (in daily stats graph but still, man...#43! I gonna buy two 5870 sometime and my rig may just make it to top 10!!! out of 86,000!!! this is UNREAL man...)
On my nVidia 9800 GT I was cracking like 146 million keys per second, this very low rate is soo shameful compared to AMD :)))
DanNeely - Monday, April 4, 2011 - link
It's not just dnetc, ugly differences in performance also show up in the milkeyway@home and collatz conjecture projects on the boinc platform. They're much larger that the 1/8 vs 1/5(1/4 in 69xx?) differences in FP64/FP32 between would justify; IIRC both are about 5:1 in AMD's favor.Ryan Smith - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
I love what the Dnet guys do with their client, and in the past it's been a big help to us in our articles, especially on the AMD side.With that said, it's a highly hand optimized client that almost perfectly traces theoretical performance. It doesn't care about cache, it doesn't care about memory bandwidth; it only cares about how many arithmetic operations can be done in a second. That's not very useful to us; it doesn't tell us anything about the hardware.
We want to stick to distributed computing clients that have a single binary for both platforms, so that we're looking at the performance of a common OpenCL/DirectCompute codepath and how it performs on two different GPUs. The Dnet client just doesn't meet that qualification.
tviceman - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
Ryan are you going to be using the nvidia 270 drivers in future tests? I know they're beta, but it looks like you aren't using WHQL AMD drivers either (11.4 preview).Ryan Smith - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
Yes, we will. The benchmarking for this article was actually completed shortly after the GTX 590, so by the time NVIDIA released the 270 drivers it was already being written up.ajp_anton - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
When looking at the picture of those packed sardines, I had an idea.Why don't the manufacturers make the radial fan hole go all the way through the card? With three or four cards tightly packed, the middle card(s) will still have some air coming through the other cards, assuming the holes are aligned.
Even with only one or two cards, the (top) card will have access to more fresh air than before.
semo - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
Correct me if I'm wrong but the idea is to keep the air flowing through the shroud body and not through and through the fans. I think this is a moot point though as I can't see anyone using a 3x GPU config without water cooling or something even more exotic.casteve - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
"It turns out adding a 3rd card doesn’t make all that much more noise."Yeah, I guess if you enjoy 60-65dBA noise levels, the 3rd card won't bother you. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just toss a hairdryer inside your PC? You'd get the same level of noise and room heater effect. ;)
slickr - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link
I mean mass effect 2 is a console port, Civilisation 5 is the worst game to choose to benchmark as its a turn based game and not real time and Hawx is 4 years outdated and basically game that Nvidia made, its not even funny anymore seeing how it gives the advantage to Nvidia cards every single time.Replace with:
Crysis warhead to Aliens vs predator
battleforge to shogun 2 total war
hawx to Shift 2
Civilization 5 to Starcraft 2
Mass Effect 2 with Dead Space 2
Wolfeinstein to Arma 2
+add Mafia 2