HD5970 Reviews

[SocketMan]

However, having reviews published using a tool that ATI didn't intend to be available to the general public leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Why would a company "provide" a tool capable of frying it's flagship product - to the "general public"?
People who really needed - will find it.General public is safer
with out it imo.
I mean you don't see family minivans that come with nitrous oxide as a standard option - it's just bad for business.
Could be something simple like not have a disclaimer pop-up about voiding the warranty if the tool is used.

Besides it's not like without this tool - certain features that you pay for - get disabled (after the fact) when/if
"öther" hardware is present (cough,cough,coughhhhphysX)


As for all the reviews (no matter how great/detailed they are) - none are complete without the actual DX11 games.

edit*
Can someone please tell the ATI guys that AMD also "makes" (designs) CPUs,and a very few people out there are interested how these new cards would perform on systems other then i7 920.In other words send a couple to the sites that would run these (cards) on Phenom/Athlon 2''s.

[Hell Hound]

Wait for x6 then we can compare x4 to x6 amd only platform.What I want to know is why are they not using 8x aa when available,also why 32bit os with 6gb mem.

[Helloworld_98]

Wait for x6 then we can compare x4 to x6 amd only platform.What I want to know is why are they not using 8x aa when available,also why 32bit os with 6gb mem.

they don't use 8xAA because they know the nvidia cards will get owned

for the 32b OS, they could have done the registry hack which allows it to use more than that.

[Shadov]

Wait for x6 then we can compare x4 to x6 amd only platform.What I want to know is why are they not using 8x aa when available,also why 32bit os with 6gb mem.

Some AAx8 for you then... :-)

[safan80]

Some AAx8 for you then... :-)

lol
I would like to see more reviews use SLI 285s instead of the 295(which is a joke except for the asus mars). The one thing that is missing when crossfire 5870 is thrown in is SLI 285s and vice versa. Only a few reviews have both crossfire 5870s and SLI 285s. Reviewers are getting lazy and care more about getting the review out the door than having quality attachjed to their review.

[Hell Hound]

Thats still 4x aa

[Wesker]

Thats still 4x aa

I always question reviewer's methods when they don't test high end video cards with 8xAA. Heck, I run my 4890 with 8xAA in as many games I can (bar Crysis).

I think the lack of testing at 8xAA has shown the HD5000 series to be quite underwhelming in a misleading way. As you can see in the benchmarks above, at 8xAA the HD5970, HD5870 CF and HD5870 really shine (which is amazing when we consider them to be "bandwidth contrained").

[SKYMTL]

Why would a company "provide" a tool capable of frying it's flagship product - to the "general public"?

I am not saying they SHOULD. What I was saying is that AMD provided it to reviewers, reviewers used it in their articles and based part of their conclusions off of software that would not be available to the general public. Indeed, ATI dedicated a number of marketing slides to Hemlock's overclocking ability but the only way one can achieve those overclocks is to bump voltage into the chips.

[Solus Corvus]

I am not saying they SHOULD. What I was saying is that AMD provided it to reviewers, reviewers used it in their articles and based part of their conclusions off of software that would not be available to the general public. Indeed, ATI dedicated a number of marketing slides to Hemlock's overclocking ability but the only way one can achieve those overclocks is to bump voltage into the chips.

Just because they aren't providing end users with the official ATI made tool doesn't mean they aren't trying to provide a way for its users to tweak voltages. Since the warranty is up to each AIB, it's probably up to each one to decide if they will provide an "official" voltage tweak tool or not. Essentially it would be a legal CYA for ATI while still providing the functionality you'd need to extract as much possible from the card. The tgdaily article reinforces that impression:

"We've built all of this headroom into the board itself, and we're also doing some special stuff in the software as well. The bar in the ATI Overdrive utility goes higher than ever before, and we're working with some of our AIB partners on software that will unlock even more overclocking potential through voltage tweaking applications," added Nekechuk.

[Monstru]

I am not saying they SHOULD. What I was saying is that AMD provided it to reviewers, reviewers used it in their articles and based part of their conclusions off of software that would not be available to the general public. Indeed, ATI dedicated a number of marketing slides to Hemlock's overclocking ability but the only way one can achieve those overclocks is to bump voltage into the chips.

Andpeople who really overclock really mind this...The test with non-stock volts are for overclockers (at least from my point of view). No software tool, no problem, you can allways vmod the card, just like allways.