With everything going green, it was only a matter of time before we added more power consumption testing in the labs. With all the advancements in graphic cards--multiple GPUs, multiple power connections, Crossfire, and SLI--they're now one of the biggest energy hogs in your rig. Our goal is to look at GPU power consumption and measure power vs. performance vs.cost.
The test bed is Intel-based, with a Core i7 965 processor at 3.20GHz and 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz. The meter used to measure the system's power is a Watts up? Pro ES. Watts up? is a "plug load" meter that measures the amount of electricity used by whatever is plugged into it.
Testing is done in two states, first the idle test; this is where we simulate an end-user environment, by opening Internet Explorer, iTunes, and Windows Mail. We then let the system idle for about 5 minutes, export the results from the Watts up?, and use the average of the total idle watts for our score.
The next phase is a 3D high-end test, where we have Crysis running multiple runs at 1,600x1,200 resolution and, like the idle test, we export and average the data.
For a detailed look at the actual testing process, check out the gallery below for photos of our GPU power testing setup. To see the actual results of our power consumption testing, check out these recent graphics card reviews.
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nVidia)
You think your SLI or CrossFire setup of the latest graphics card is powerful? Well, it might be. However, it's nothing compared to the single card that Nvidia introduced on Monday.
The Quadro FX 5800 is arguably the most powerful professional graphics card in the world...for now. Unfortunately, it's not a gaming card.
The new card works best for professionals searching for oil, diagnosing illness, or styling the next high-performance luxury vehicle, or anyone with the need for advanced visual-computing solutions.
The Quadro FX 5800 has 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores and features 4GB of graphics RAM. (To put this in perspective, a Windows 32-bit computer, like most computers out there, can address just a little more than 3.5GB of RAM). All this results in unprecedented performance and scalability. The Quadro FX 5800 is now able to visualize and interpret massive datasets that until now were unattainable on a workstation graphics board.
Other advanced features of the card include:
- Interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capabilities
- Massive memory bandwidth of up to 102GB per second
- Fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels per second and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second
- Support for next-generation OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX 10 applications
- Advanced multisystem and multidevice visualization environments with Quadro G-Sync II
With great power comes great...price. The new Quadro FX 5800 is estimated to cost about $3,500 and will be available shortly via third-party card makers.
Just one month after releasing the FirePro V5700 and FirePro 3700, AMD on Thursday announced upgrades of new video cards for workstation PCs. The all-new FirePro V8700 and the FirePro V3750 will be available for purchase later this year.
The V8700 is the high-end card that provides up to 40 percent performance gain over the previous model for memory intensive applications, such as those used in computer-aided design or digital content creation. The V3750, on the other hand, is an entry-level professional graphics accelerator.
ATI FirePro V8700 graphics accelerator is designed for people who work with large models and shader-intensive applications offering a large frame buffer for complex and large data sets. Plus, it has a 30-bit display pipeline for accurate color reproduction and superior visual quality. The card features 1GB of GDDR5 frame buffer memory with 800 shader units, allowing engineers and designers to focus on project work without concerns for memory limitations. The FirePro V8700 graphics accelerator features two DisplayPort connectors and a Dual-Link DVI-I display output.
ATI FirePro V3750 is a 3D workstation graphics accelerator that offers an average of 30 percent performance improvement over the previous generation. It, too, features DisplayPort and dual link DVI outputs but comes with only 256MB of frame buffer memory with 320 shader processing units.
The two new cards will begin to ship in the fourth quarter of this year with the estimated prices to be $1,499 for the FirePro V8700T and $199 for the FirePro V3750.
PowerColor's ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 card.
(Credit: PowerColor)The reviews are in for AMD's new high-end 3D card--the embargoed, but not exactly secret 2GB Radeon HD 4870 X2--and the official results are as enthusiastic as the previews. By all accounts, the $550 Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the fastest desktop 3D board on the market, outpacing Nvidia's flagship GeForce GTX 280 card on most tests.
According to the results on PC Perspective, Hot Hardware, ExtremeTech, and Anandtech, AMD's new card comes up faster than both a single $450 GeForce GTX 280 as well as two $250 GeForce GTX 260's. Nvidia may steal a win here and there depending on the settings, such as on Crysis, but at higher resolutions and with more image quality details turned on, the AMD card and its 2GB of fast DDR5 memory the Radeon HD 4870 X2 fares better overall.
You won't really see a benefit from the 4870 X2 unless you play games at 1,920x1,200-pixel resolution or higher. That means unless you own a 24-inch or better LCD, you should probably stick to lower-end cards, at least for the moment. You can also double-up AMD's new card in CrossFire mode (AMD's multicard technology, and competitor to Nvidia's SLI), but that would be hard to justify on anything less than a 30-inch display.
Keep in mind that to see any kind of performance gain, both the graphics drivers and the games themselves need to know how to distribute the workload efficiently across multiple graphics chips. AMD's drivers seem to get along well with current games, but we have no guarantee that that will continue to be the case. Of course, you can't exactly wait for new tests for every title that comes out. And based on the performance the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has shown so far, we think it's a safe bet.
AMD announced today that its next-generation ATI Radeon graphics cards will be the first commercial implementation of GDDR5 memory. According to the company, the new memory will allow for faster, smaller, and cheaper graphics cards:
"The higher data rates supported by GDDR5--up to 5x that of GDDR3 and 4x that of GDDR4--enable more bandwidth over a narrower memory interface, which can translate into superior performance delivered from smaller, more cost-effective chips."
The benefits of GDDR5 memory also include increased accuracy in calculations by way of new error detection mechanisms and more power-efficient graphics cards, according to AMD.
This is all well and good, but without honkin' graphics card that sounds like a vacuum when you fire up Crysis, how will the others at the LAN party know you mean business?
(Source)
AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 uses two 3D chips to process game graphics.
(Credit: CNET)A week after it was supposed to, AMD announced its Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card today. Roughly $450 will get you this high-end 3D card, which melds two Radeon HD 3870 chips onto a single 3D card package. The resulting performance is basically the same as two standalone Radeon HD 3870 cards in AMD's multicard ATI Crossfire mode. Various review sites show it competing more or less well against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra cards, although neither AMD nor Nvidia can claim an across-the-board victory.
Our illustrious colleagues at GameSpot are working diligently on updating their benchmarks for this card after a late-breaking driver update (the reason for the cancellation of last Monday's announcement). We weren't originally going to retest, but for reasons unrelated to the driver, we decided we would. Once we have scores, both CNET and Gamespot will post our respective reviews. In the meantime, Anandtech, ExtremeTech, and PC Perspective have well-done coverage of AMD's new card. And how do those sites find the DirectX 10 performance picture?
... Read moreAMD's new Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 graphics cards represent the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the 3870 X2 whose benchmark results and technical details we're not allowed to discuss until later. Where the 3870 X2 is...something else, the 3400 and the 3600 sit firmly on the budget side of the aisle.
You'll find the Radeon HD 3400 in half-height cards like this one, making it suited for smaller desktops.
(Credit: AMD)The 3400 will feature card variants ranging from $50 to $65 or so, and the 3600's will go from $80 to $100. Neither version will deliver top-line 3D performance, but they will each give you a step up in speed over an integrated chip. These cards are also the ones that ATI has in mind for its Hybrid Crossfire set up, wherein you pair a budget Radeon 3D card with an ATI-based motherboard and its built-in 3D chip for an extra performance boost, budget CrossFire-style. ATI's chipsets have not seen wide adoption in mainstream desktops yet, so Hybrid Crossfire will likely benefit the budget DIY crowd and those willing to take a chance on a lesser known PC vendor. Nvidia, of course, has its own competing technology, in the form of Hybrid SLI, which it announced at this year's CES.
The more substantial Radeon HD 3600 will give you slightly better 3D performance than the 3400, although it's still a budget card.
(Credit: AMD)Other specifics of the new cards include support for DirectX 10.1, PCI-Express 2.0 and the burgeoning DisplayPort video interface. DX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0 are essentially marketing check boxes describing features that won't make too much difference at the budget level. For DisplayPort, AMD provides this support as an optional feature for its board partners (Asus, GigaByte, etc.) and large-quantity desktop vendors (Dell, HP) to implement as they see fit. Don't expect to see a lot of DisplayPort outputs on these cards on retail shelves, but as the standard becomes more prevalent on the monitors themselves, DisplayPort will become more and more common.
(Credit:
AMD)
We saw a story on ATI's new Radeon HD 3870 X2 3D graphics card and its delayed launch on the Inquirer this morning before we got into the office. Once we got into the office we were able to confirm the situation for ourselves. The nondisclosure agreement we signed precludes us from revealing what it is we're unable to confirm, exactly. Instead, we'll simply say that the shifty date-maneuvering discussed in the Inquirer piece seems to happen more often than not with the graphics and CPU vendors and their product releases.
Both major graphics chip vendors are taking the covers off of new technologies that let you use multiple graphics chips.
Advanced Micro Devices showed CNET Reviews its ATI Hybrid Crossfire design the other day, and various previews of Nvidia's new 3-way SLI popped up around the Web as well. The two takes on multichip graphics processing couldn't be more different from each other, and each reflects where their respective vendor seems to be throwing much of its energy lately.
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AMD)
Being populists, we're most excited by Hybrid Crossfire design. When supporting motherboards and systems come out next year, budget AMD graphics card will be able to share processing tasks with the graphics chips built into forthcoming AMD-based motherboards.
Based on the demo AMD showed us, the two low-end chips working together make even new 3D games playable, which is more than can be said for either an integrated 3D chip or most budget 3D cards by themselves. We saw a Hybrid Crossfire rig give games like Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, and Call of Duty 4 roughly 10 frames per second over their scores, with just a budget Radeon card by itself. Nvidia is rumored to be working on its own version of such a solution, but we have yet to hear anything official about it.
3-way SLI will take up a lot of motherboard real estate.
(Credit: Nvidia)On the other end of the price spectrum, we have Nvidia's 3-Way SLI. This is actually a step down from the outlandish quad-SLI technology that Nvidia introduced in 2006, but that was also a generation ago in chip technology, which meant no support for DirectX 10 graphics. 3-Way SLI only works with Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra graphics cards, so 3-way SLI is really only for those who already have very high-end systems. Forgetting even the monitor or the rest of the computer, that's $1,500 in graphics cards alone.
If that price doesn't make you blink, the good news is that early benchmarks show 3-Way SLI delivering amazing 3D performance, at least for the most part. HotHardware reports that 3-Way SLI support in Crysis is broken (supposedly, a developer patch is on the way), but otherwise, 3-way SLI tests in DirectX 10 games such as Bioshock, and Company Heroes have shown significant performance gains over traditional two-card setups.
What's also exciting is that there's no wait for 3-way. You'll need a special 3-way connector (and we have no details on where or when those will be available), but 3-way SLI will work on any Nvidia 680i SLI motherboard that has three PCI Express x16 slots.
As more or less expected, AMD announced the availability of a new ATI graphics card today, the Radeon HD 2900 Pro. The announcement came with no pricing, nor any specific clock speeds, although the general assumption is that the Pro is a cheaper, slightly slower version of the $399 Radeon HD 2900 XT that came out earlier this year. The press release cites 1GB and 512MB variations of the Pro card, as well as 9-inch and 12-inch versions, depending on the fan and heatsink assembly.
ATI announced the Radeon HD 2900 Pro today, a presumably dialed-down version of the Radeon HD 2900 XT pictured here.
(Credit: AMD)Our hope is that the HD 2900 Pro will finally deliver the midrange, next-generation 3D card ATI has lacked here in the Windows Vista era. Your choices so far have been the sluggish Radeon HD 2600 XT for $150, or the $400 Radeon HD 2900 XT powerhouse, leaving the true $200 to $300 midrange sweet spot to Nvidia. The Radeon 2900 Pro may not come in below $300 (especially if the laws of supply and demand come into play due to the card's initial availability "on a limited basis subject to supply contraints," as reported by AMD's press release), but we welcome any expansion of the Radeon product line, if only to help keep consumer-friendly competition alive in the graphics card market.
