Review Cast your eye over our news piece on AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5970 and our review of the HD 5870 and you’ll have the essential information at your fingertips. AMD has, for some unknown reason, changed its naming convention, so this two-chip HD 5870-based graphics card has been named HD 5970 instead of the more predictable HD 5870 X2.
Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5970: overclocked, slightly
What we have here is a very long graphics card with two HD 5870 GPUs that are linked by a PCI Express 2.1 bridge chip along with two groups of GDDR 5 memory that total 2GB. A single HD 5870 chip packs 1600 Stream processors into one 40nm core, so the HD 5970 has a startling total of 3200 shaders.
The key features have been carried over from the HD 5870, including support for DirectX 11, triple monitor support with ATI Eyefinity and some nifty power-saving technology. That said, although AMD has worked wonders to reduce the power draw of the HD 5000 series at idle, the fact remains that the two chips draw plenty of power when they are under load. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The Sapphire Vapor-X HD 4850 is a reference Radeon HD 4850 with an after-market cooler. That might not sound like a big deal, but Sapphire has come up with something special.
Most graphics card manufacturers try to differentiate their products from the competition and they often use the trick of changing the reference cooler for their own design to add some visual impact. Sapphire has plenty of history in this department and seems to be constantly developing new coolers for its range of AMD ATI Radeon HD-based graphics cards.
The starting point with the HD 4850 is the reference ATI cooler:
It’s very compact. The GPU and memory are covered by a copper heatsink with a slim line cooling fan at the far end that draws air across the heatsink. This allows the HD 4850 to be manufactured as a single-slot design but the downside is that the cooler sheds its heat inside the casing and it runs unpleasantly hot at all times. Once the HD 4850 has warmed up, the GPU operates at a constant 80-82°C regardless of whether your PC is displaying the Windows Desktop or working hard playing Crysis. Read the rest of this entry »
