Quote Originally Posted by initialised View Post
Maybe when the VRM's hit the amperage limit the card tries to increase power draw from the PCIe resulting in an over-current condition and shuts down the port, that still puts the alleged fault with the card not the board. Overvolting the PCIe bus might get around this on some systems.

Try using the three data points makes a line in two dimensional space approach to formulate a test:

3 3-phase cards from 3 vendors
3 4-phase cards from 3 vendors
3 different X58 boards
3 different Dragon boards
3 different P45 DDR3 boards
3 different sets of DDR3 RAM
3 different OSes Win-7, Vista, XP
3 different DX9 builds

Test each card on each platform with each set of RAM with a fresh install of each OS and each DX9 build. If the 3-Phase cards all fail and all the 4-Phase cards all pass in all configurations. Then you can be fairly sure that the 3-Phase cards are incompatible with your test.

Then the question becomes 'is it your test software, DirectX or the cards that is at fault?'

If you rewrite the test from scratch in OpenGL or DX10(.1) will the fault still occur?

Does data from GPU-z corroborate what you have found with RivaTuner?

Does data from multi-meters corroborate with software monitoring apps?

I'm not saying that your findings are wrong, I doubt that they are but convincing ATi and their board partners that 3-Phase power is not enough for will probably take the level of scientific rigour I've proposed above.

Even then is it relevant if there are no commercial (let alone AAA) games that are capable of stressing the hardware to this level while retaining playable framerates?

BRAVO! This is how science is done!

The rest of the fanboy fest in this thread is so full of utter fail

I can't even begin to fathom how any logical conclusion can be made without a scientific approach that eliminates the possible variables as initialised wrote.