HD5970 Reviews

[Monstru]

I think your giving AMD too much benefit of the doubt.

If you think these marketing slides were only meant be be seen by the press, I don't think you are giving the public enough credit.

Reviewers, websites are the most likely to see through the BS, however, alot of reviewers will post these slides which will also be seen by readers.

Well, have you seen any Nvidia, Gigabyte or MSI slides lately? I've seen. Maaan there are some interesting claims there. Why don't I see nobody bashing them?

The overclocking headroom has been particularly stressed with this card. It's why there are so many websites disproving, bigs ones like anandtech, because there is real controversy here. I haven't seen a card particular stressed for its overclocking potential by the GPU manufacturer as much as this card. And the opposite is happening, we are getting worse overclocking potential than most cards in general on stock voltages. It overclocks a bit better with higher volts, but as anandtech noted, with certain applications, said overclocks are useless when the card throttles down.

Big sites like Anandtech said that high VTT will kill your Wolfdales and they were wrong. Yes, people are naive indeed

Not to mention overvolting a card, voids the warranty if anything goes wrong with most if not all manufacturers.

How AMD is advertising the overclocking ability of this card, its seems like its idiot proof and you got massive headroom. This clearly isn't the case. It involves finding an overvolting tool, requires tweaking of your fan profile to possibly impractical levels.

Overclocking is not idiot proof, it has never been and it will never be. The amount of overclocking is not guaranteed by the manufacturer. Overclocking to high clocks is not at hand for everybody. If it were, we would all be kingpin now

Secondly, its this type of debugging that might sway people to buy 5850CF over this solution. Its cheaper and more overclockable.

That is not a bad ideea at all. But the difference is not that big. Let's end this conversation and see what we are actually talking about. Of course, keep in mind that these data is based on the samples I have, this does not represent the overall OC potential of any of the cards.


So, HD 5870 is by far the best of them all. Rightfully, this should have had no limits in CCC and it should have been marketed as the VGA with massive OC headroom. However, the BBA only gave me 925MHz GPU with stock volts. The study bellow is done with an Asus HD5870.



This is the HD 5870's VRM, by far the best of the three cards.


The HD 5850 I used was the reference sample from ATI. It shows pretty good voltage scaling. The vGPu is lower then HD 5870's, but higher then HD 5970's.



This is HD 5850's VRM.

I have tested 3 HD 5970 in overclocking, one HIS and two BBA's. The all clock within 10-20 MHz range. This is done with one of the BBA's. As you can see, the HD 5970 has the lowest vGPU.



Of course, as we all know, this is how HD 5970 looks naked.


Now, taking into consideration we have a two full Cypress GPU's on a PCB, with all 1600 stream procesors and all that, and we have the lowest vGPU, does it clock bad? No, it seems normal to me and it seems in line with what her sisters are getting. HD 5850 has a little bit simpler GPU and a higher vGPU, while HD 5870 goes way in front due to it's strong VRM design. Is there anything wrong here? No, this looks normal to me.


Now, did ATI do a smart thing by marketing the HD5970 as the unlocked board with Oc headroom? No, this is marketing BS, the HD 5870 should have had unlocked CCC and should have been marketed like this. Are they lying to the buyers? No, it is just every day marketing BS that we see in all the slides and presentations, from all manufacturer. The just wanted to add some value to the product using this claim.

So yeah, marketing HD 5970 as the "fierce overclocker" is not a very bright ideea, but it just falls under the marketing BS category we see everyday, it is not something to get that excited about.



Some last few words. The data above is from an article I am working on, about overclocking on HD 5xxx series. That is "work in progress" data, since I did not go with all the cards to the same max voltage, I did not use the same stepts, and so on. Also, this is just the part about air-cooling using software to adjust the voltaje, the cards will also be vmodded to find their tru max. Of course that will happen on LN2. So, this is work in progress stuff, i know it's not apples to apples comparison since the values for vGPU are different between the 3 cards.

Excuses excuses. You say that it can overclock safely without issues. I called shens. Anandtech and LH have said the same.

Sorry bro, but somebody is looking for excuses, and it is not me. I am happy, fine and dandy about how HD 5xxx overclock, and I have screenies to proove that. If id does not work for you, it does not mean is bad