Quote Originally Posted by Astennu View Post
1: Who says the card is PCI-E limited ?
I do. Grab an IDE disk(and disconect every SATA drive you have), push the PCI-e clock to the max and do some benches. Then bring the PCI-e clock to stock and do the same beches again. Let us know the difference.

2: I dont think 3dmark vantage scores are very specific.
3D Mark is almost useless benchmark for measuring real-world gaming performance. It can be used only as a meter when you compare two cards with same architecture, but with different clocks on the same CPU. That's why I call BS on the 28% better part and why I doubt that the tweakedd 5970 will be more than 15% faster than the stock in average.

Normally 3Dmark does not scale well with higher clocks. I know normal scaling is not 100% with clocks 12% higher clocks mostly result in 8-9% higher fps.
Different types of graphics cards act differently. If the VGA has plenty of VRAM bandwidth then upping the VRAM clocks will add no points to the result, but if the VGA is bandwidth hungry you will se almost linear scalling in performance with only increasing the VRAM clock. The best example for that is the 8800GT. It's bandwidth starved.

Keep in mind the 5970 classic is not really 1GB !!.
Theoretically it has 2GB on board, but in reallity it is exactly a 1GB card.


Because its a dual GPU card. CF and SLI in there current form dont have a shared memory pool. Every GPU has one GB. But because they both need to render the same scenes (only different frames) they both need the same information in there memory buffer. And because of that CF and SLI setups of 2gb effectively have 1GB.
I perfectly understand that.

So the 4GB effectively is 2GB.
That's why I was talking about 1GB vs 2GB frame buffer(or reference 5970 vs tweaked 5970).

And i think you will see some difference between the 5970 2gb and the 4gb. I guess you could see 5-10% depending on the resolution.
I don't think so. IMO there would be no gain at all in 99% of the cases.

and also do not forget eyefinity. Its possible to get resolutions up to 24 mega pixel. 6x more then a single 30" display. And thats the most important reason for the bigger frame buffer. I think vs dual screen there are quite a lot of people using 3 screen eyefinity with 3x22" you already have 5.7 mpixel vs 4.09 of a single 30" display. And yes i know people who use it do play games.
BINGO! I forgot eyefinity There these tweaked 5970's are going to shine! So, it will be the card for those who will buy a pair and at least 3 30" monitors.

3: I'm not comparing single to multi gpu scaling i'm comparing a dual 5970 vs another dual 5970.
OK, because you menitoned single Radeon 8500 64MB and single Radeon 4850 512MB. These cards have nothing common with a card like the 5970(the stock and the tweaked).

But we will just have to wait and see how it will perform in the real world. There are already 3 vendors that will bring a 850-1200 4GB 5970 to the market. So i think we will some nice reviews when that time comes.
Yeap. We'll wait and see.