The ATI Radeon 5XXX Thread

[LordEC911]

At launch, PowerPlay was broken with the RV770 core only downclocking to 500MHz. Now, even RV790 downclocks to 240MHz and I assume that ATI made changes to idle state definitions through driver updates.

Dave Baumann begs to differ, PowerPlay was not "broken" at launch.

The biggest power-hog wasn't the GPU but the GDDR5. You could save much energy when you downclock the RAM down to 200 MHz. IIrc the consumption decreased by 20 Watt in IDLE after downclocking.

That's why you should always have a notebook to surf teh interwebz and do office-tasks. I don't want to know how many do such things with a i7... Energy-costs don't seem to be high enough me thinks

Also, it wasn't just the GDDR5 ICs but also the memory controllers, since the individual ICs simply couldn't be consuming such large amounts of wattage.

Edit- There was talk of no PCI-e stickers if they go over the 300w TDP, so it doesn't look like something AMD/ATi themselves will be doing anytime soon.