Pretesting Sapphire 5870's
 

I got the nice occassion to play some with these cards... at the moment still figuring out which OS is best to run on :

Starting off with Vantage :

Single card :

Windows 7 32bit : slightly higher GPU scores, lower CPU scores : first run after a reboot is always the fastest. Fastest total score out of 3 benches compared to the 64 bit version. Difference though was max 70 points :D

Windows 7 64 bit : GPU scores remain plus minus constant, CPU score is also a tad faster than 32 bit OS.

Crossfire :

only one option to go 64 bit OS... with the 32Bit version I have loads of graphical glitches with the current driver and sometimes Vantage just caps out (though FPS seemed a tad faster again then the 64 bit OS...)


Tweaking Vantage : Messing with the different settings in the Control panel didn't give much , only selecting edges in the smoothvision tab usually gave me another 30-40 points over any other setting I applied/changed... I hope the other benchmarks are more responsive to tweaking... These cards seem so CPU limited... (running 3.2ghz on the boxed cooler at the moment)

I STOPPED TESTING AS THESE DRIVERS ARE SOOOOOOO BUGGY, WHY ON EARTH TO YOU RELEASE SO FAST CARDS IF YA DRIVERS CAN'T EVEN DECENTLY ACTIVATE CROSSFIRE not even in screaming old Windows XP...

Time to get to work Terry !!

Official release 15 oc new drivers.

Who's Terry?

Catalyst engineer denk dat ie Macadon heet met zen familienaam, but not sure...

playing with ati is a art :).

I can assure you it's absolutely not !! SLI is fun, Crossfire is the suck :p

Hopeing for Gamer for better drivers

Flashed the card to the Asus bios, to overcome the 900-1300 clocks.
Now my board just shut down when stressing it in 3d marks.
Could that flash be the cause ?

Overheating?

Nope, seems like that heatsink Leeghoofd gave me is no good :(
Not touching the IHS.
Phase changed that :)

/edit :
1000/1300 = pass 06

higher = artifacts.
I can live with that.

That's an Intel boxed cooler :p how can't it touch the IHS ? Dikke vingers issue ? those are good up to 3.6-4Ghz orso, but that's it... my E8600 was already at 52°C idle at 3.6ghz with 600FSB

Wtf, I can't even boot at 401 fsb with this board ???
Updated bios to 1301, same ****.

w3540 arrived, lets see if I can do 3D01 with it :)

why bother ? just focus on 03/05 and the rest on it... Think you can hardly beat a 6Ghz E8600 on 01

Pretest lods , crossfire drivers etc...

Only one driver for xp.
Want to score more than 102k on 01 :)

Rest I'll test on dualboot.

Gamer, please select benchmarks and pre-test BCLK/VGA settings before sunday. I want to know exactly what numbers you want to hit ... otherwise it will be very difficult and we'll use too much LN2 on certain benchmarks.

Session at Albrecht was so succesful because he was well-prepared: FSB/mem/vga settings were pre-tested and he knew exactly what scores he wanted to beat.

To do list :
Flash cards : Done
Check overclock VGA : 1000/1300 = check for safe settings @ 1.250vgpu.
Check BCLK after flash :
Bech 01 - 03 - 05 -06 - Vantage with Triple- quadro cards :
Single card will not be needed since we benched 295GTX last time ?

01 will not result in a lot more points. With 24h of tweaking, you migh get 105k at 5.3G

Even if we use the E8600 ?

No, if you use the W3540.

Want to use E86 platform as well under LN2?

Yes please, for 01 :)

test the card too in crossfire Luc, max GPU/RAM clocks might be a bit lower then... but the cards looked very promising on air

Need my REX HD ? so you won't need to reinstall everything from sratch besides the ATI drivers...

Are you using Afterburner for extra voltage?

Yep, tried 1050 on 1.3vgpu = crash.
Although temps are not above 60° ???

Trying 1.350vgpu now @ 1050 mhz, so far so good in first test on 3d06.

FAIL..
Screenfailure, blank screen but benchmark did go further resulting in low score.

Max settings now : 1.3vgpu/1025mhz for single GPU.

no 1025 on Crossfire, backing down to 1000 :(

If you use both CCC and MSI afterburner, second card goes back to stock.
So make sure all is ok when you use the MSI tool.

Single card : 20090 score with 3050 mhz on the Xeon.
CF : 20875
now let's see if this goes up with overclock on the cpu.

CPU at 3500mhz : 24188.
Hmm, strange ?

Why strange?

That much improvement on 500mhz overclock ?
You could be right it's not strange :)

Just one giant CPU bottleneck ;)

Yup, HD 5870 alone is already borderline CPU bottlenecked even at 1920x1200 with AA/AF in most games, only Crysis Warhead DX10 VHQ can still stress the card and NEEDS CF to deliver playable FPS

benchmarks with resolution of 1280x1024? HD 5870 laughs at them :)
in CF you're completely CPU bottlenecked, you'll need Core i9 at 8Ghz to get a GPU bottleneck again :D

hmm, this cpu goes 80° stressed on 1.35vcore, crappy IHS :)

We should cool the cards with water, maybe 1100 on the core would be possible ?

Hmm this wil be nice :)
were exactly can i follow the results?













verdoeme ik zen moe man!:D

men setup kan 2 ati kaartjes waterkoelen... ma welke heatsinks moet ge dan allemaal hebben ?

2's too little

tough audience , hard to satisfy :p

3's to big

and

4 is just MAD

i say four :D.

Vote +1 :)

Five?

No drivers :)

these post are fun :D.

Ok, this cpu is doing 5050mhz 3D03 without a hickup.
I think the limiting factor will be the motherboard again.

And I can't find that golden driver anywhere (8.14.10.700).