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Radeon HD 5970 Offers Massive Overclocking Headroom

PrincessFrosty said:
SNIP :(
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As always you have made the mistake a lot of people do with these comparisons and have forgotten about VAT...........

Before the price increases both 5850 and 5870 worked out exactly at $/£ conversion plus VAT and bout a £10 premium which is about right for launch price/actually having stock etc.

As of today's exchange rate they should be about £415 to £420. Put a premium on for early release and maybe £450.

If they do, then compared to two 5870's they will be a bargain.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
There's rumours that this hardware is basically the same as the 5870 but has been deliberately been downclocked to meet power requirement regulations for the card, apparantly a single PCIE device should not exceed 300W during normal operation which is basically what the card is running at stock.

But users overclocking past that and causing a bigger power draw is their own choice :)

Thats probably why of all the 3 clocks (core/mem/shader) the shader is the only one that hasn't been decreased relative to the 5870, because the ATI drivers dont allow overclocking of that.

If the 300W limit is to be taken seriously does that mean that video cards are reaching a problem soon? No doubt Nvidia will have their own dual GPU counterpart I bet they run into the same problem.
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I don't think it's a hard limit of 300W as such but I believe this is a 'safe' limit for the 6+8 pin PCI-E power connector configuration before instability could be caused by a lack of power.

Much more than this and it would throw the card into an 8+8 pin configuration which starts to enter specialist PSU territory (especially if you're considering a CrossFireX setup.....4x 8 pin PCI-E connectors are harder to come by).

Everything is relative though...what you could perform on an 8800 GTX, 90nm @ 170W can now be easily thrashed by a 5870, 40nm @ a similar wattage even though the transistor count is much higher.

NVIDIA do tend to tend to deploy large power-hungry dies though which could well be a limiting factor for a dual GPU setup as you say.
 
Greebo said:
As always you have made the mistake a lot of people do with these comparisons and have forgotten about VAT...........

Before the price increases both 5850 and 5870 worked out exactly at $/£ conversion plus VAT and bout a £10 premium which is about right for launch price/actually having stock etc.

As of today's exchange rate they should be about £415 to £420. Put a premium on for early release and maybe £450.

If they do, then compared to two 5870's they will be a bargain.
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Very true (and I hope you're right) but when supply & demand kicks in (in this case demand massively overweighing the supply) then prices start to skyrocket into ludicrous proportions until the supply is met/competition kicks in.

This is the very reason why it is always a bad thing to have one company dominating the market; it's only the choice and competition that drives down the prices.
 
I think it's gonna be launch stock or nothing if you want it before xmas
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Yes I'd hazard a guess this is right, especially considering further rumours that ATI have handpicked cores that reach especially high (1Ghz) overclock

Greebo said:
As always you have made the mistake a lot of people do with these comparisons and have forgotten about VAT...........
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No I don't think so, the RRP prices I used $380/£300 are accurate with tax as the 5870's were just about £300 on release for us (price including VAT)

The $600 RRP for the US is "shipped" so essentiall covering all costs expect $600

Of course I would just love $600 (£360) @ $1:£0.6 with 15% VAT which is £415 as a launch price but I seriously doubt we'll see that.

You up your estimated price from £415 to £450 somehow due to a "premium" which I dont understand at all, the US don't pay above RRP for day 0 cards so this "premium" you speak of is just the UK getting ripped off as usual.

I hope you're right and we see straight conversions but it's not going to happen, none of my high end kit has ever come in like that, even when budget hunting online between the various well known e-tailers.

If I had to guess I'd say £480 for the cheapest brand going up from there.

I don't think it's a hard limit of 300W as such but I believe this is a 'safe' limit for the 6+8 pin PCI-E power connector configuration before instability could be caused by a lack of power.
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It's not a "hard" limit as such, it's a specifications recomendation for PCIE cards, I'm not sure who regulates that or the possible repercussions of breaking that "limit", I'm reading up about that today actually.

*edit*

Review popped up

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?cid=3&id=3072

that's h&rdwar3z0ne if the forum blocks the domain...
 
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Bah, from that review the overclocks dont look great...

Using the in-built ATI Overdrive overclocking tool, we managed 800MHz at the core and 4400MHz DDR at the memory, which gave us a negligible improvement of 120 3DMarks. Further attempts to replicate the higher clock speeds of the Radeon HD 5870 failed, as Vantage would crash halfway into the benchmarking run. Apparently, the Radeon HD 5970 is not a very keen overclocker despite what ATI /AMD would like to have us believe. Perhaps it could be somewhat linked to the early driver nature and this may yet see an area of improvement in the near future.
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Looks like ran low on power before they could hit the 5870 speeds, lame :/
 
Well volt modding is beyond most users willingness to overclock, the cable config is only supplying 300W and the card is basically pulling that at stock so for the people overclocking simply for performance benefit and not as a hobby I dont think we'll see 5870 speeds.
 
I hope its a great card. that should have Nv trembling :p

things are getting interesting I must say been boring seeing all Nv cards at the top
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Well volt modding is beyond most users willingness to overclock, the cable config is only supplying 300W and the card is basically pulling that at stock so for the people overclocking simply for performance benefit and not as a hobby I dont think we'll see 5870 speeds.
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Volt modding is in software though isn't it? Perhaps the utils don't work for it yet.

ANyway the the power charts is for the whole system, not the graphics card as the gtx295 is pulling 348W on it's own otherwise!

AFIK a 6-pin pci-e can supply up to 75W, an 8 pin one 150W and the pci-e 2 board should do 225W as well giving a total of 450W for the card. I assume the card is limited to 300W so it is backwards compatible and work in pci-e 1 boards which can only give 75W through the slot giving a max of 300W.

So power should not be the issue as they won;t be anywhere near 450W. I suspect it's dodgy driver issues (or perhaps make sure you use a mobo with an additional molex power connector for the pci-e slots)
 
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PrincessFrosty said:
Well volt modding is beyond most users willingness to overclock, the cable config is only supplying 300W and the card is basically pulling that at stock so for the people overclocking simply for performance benefit and not as a hobby I dont think we'll see 5870 speeds.
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Digital VRMs means its will be as easy as moving a slider to up the core voltage. The power supplied via PCI-E 6 and 8 pin is a rating limit, it doesn't physically limit the actual power available. In fact a cable will continue to supply power until it overheats and melts or the psu gives out and/or hits a current limiter.

Greebo said:
Volt modding is in software though isn't it? Perhaps the utils don't work for it yet.
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Probaly not just yet, but it will.

Greebo said:
AFIK a 6-pin pci-e can supply up to 75W, an 8 pin one 150W and the pci-e 2 board should do 225W as well giving a total of 450W for the card. I assume the card is limited to 300W so it is backwards compatible and work in pci-e 1 boards which can only give 75W through the slot giving a max of 300W.
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There is some contention if the PCI-E 2.0 slot power increased to 150W. I don't think it has, i.e. still 75W. So either a 300W or 375W llimit for the card. I agree with the backwards compatible issue.

http://www.10stripe.com/featured/quick/pci-express-2-0.php
The power spec has also been increased. A new version of the power supply connector that is used for graphics cards that need more power than the slot can deliver (sometimes called a PEG connector, for PCI-Express Graphics) has been introduced, changing from 6 pins to 8. A single x16 card may now draw up to 300 W of power (75 W from the slot itself, 150 W from an 8-pin PEG connector, 75 W from a second PEG connector), up from 225 W (75 W from the slot, 75 W each from 2 6-pin PEG connectors) or originally 150 W (75 W from the slot, 75 W from a 6-pin PEG connector).
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Thanks fornowagain. I was struggling to find evidence one way or not as to whether the pci-e 2 slot supplied more than 75W

Point is from thatt review is the gtx295 draws 50W more power than the 5970 under load and has the same power lead connectors which means the 5970 has at least another 50W to use (and people overclock gtx295 so even more really) so I doubt it's a power supply issue unless the review site used a bad board/psu.

We'll have to wait for some more reviews.
 
Can't see it being a power issue other than the psu being man enough. From over-clocking a pair of 5870, pretty much as you'd expect. I would imagine up to a point it'll be about the core voltage. After that it'll be the temps.
 
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