The 4870X2 vs 5870 shootout!

[EarthDog]

Uncompressed as a .png should do the trick. Just attach it as a thumbnail to photobucket or something...

 

[jokers_greg]

Don't worry Jokers... i'm never far away...

Sorry been working a lot recently since its the run up to christmas!!

Most of the credit goes to Neural as he is the one who did the final write up... i just ran some benchmarks!!

Cheers for all the comments guys... as for AA effects i left them default in CCC (let application decide) i never bothered tweaking it becuase everything looks perfectly fine to me....

Thanks for all the positive feedback... its been a lot of fun doing it, we were hoping to get some card overclocking results in too but the x2 isn't a great clocker and im scared about bricking it if i try and flash the bios as im poor at the moment and dont fancy buying another graphics card just now!!

If anyone has any requests for any benchmarks or specific settings we would be more than happy to run them...

Put that sucker under water, and we'll see where it goes! haha. How's the loop so far btw. Thanks for helpin out with the benchmarks!

 

[mattspalace]

FYI, bios flashing video cards is a cake walk. It's takes MUCH longer to simply create the boot disk and write the files than to actually flash the card, which takes all of three seconds.

The Asus bios will allow overclocking to 1200/1400, but most 5870s will hit the wall in the neighborhood of 950/1300. MSI afterburner voltage tweaks can take the card to over 1GHz on the core, but that usually requires running the fan quite high.

Don't be afraid to bios flash, there are several step-by-step guides out there, and as long as you follow them to the "T", you won't have any issues most likely.

I've personally flashed three 5870's with no problem. I sold two and kept the two currently in my rig.

 

[Neural Net]

FYI, bios flashing video cards is a cake walk. It's takes MUCH longer to simply create the boot disk and write the files than to actually flash the card, which takes all of three seconds.

The Asus bios will allow overclocking to 1200/1400, but most 5870s will hit the wall in the neighborhood of 950/1300. MSI afterburner voltage tweaks can take the card to over 1GHz on the core, but that usually requires running the fan quite high.

Don't be afraid to bios flash, there are several step-by-step guides out there, and as long as you follow them to the "T", you won't have any issues most likely.

I've personally flashed three 5870's with no problem. I sold two and kept the two currently in my rig.

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

I bet that a lot don't flash the BIOS on their graphics cards is because it voids the warranty more than anything else. Such a fear is perhaps unfounded, but I can see why lots wouldn't do it for that reason.

It's probably due to a few horror stories of flashes going wrong that a lot more don't do it, which is a shame because if it could have become a feature supported by the vendors themselves, such as a BIOS flash utility for high end cards with custom cooling to set permanent custom clocks etc.

 

[mattspalace]

I'd rather ATi simply fix CCC to allow higher overclocks.. It would fix the whole deal of flashing for the most part. This is all the Asus bios does - changes CCC upper limits, which are ridiculously low.

 

[Neural Net]

Definitely, that would also be my preferred solution, even the 4870X2 has more than 50Mhz overclocking headroom in CCC. I would like to know the reasoning behind the the 900Mhz limit.

 

[CharlieCS]

You dont need to flash the card just use ATT to bypass the limit .Also great results , and well done.

 

[hank123]

nice work man!