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    Reviews » Hardware » Videocards

    avatar

    EVGA GTX 470 SC Review

    Posted 06/29/2010 at 1:27pm | by Loyd Case
    2
    Comments

    GPUs that cost $500 are all well and good, but the sweet spot for high-end graphics cards is in the $350–$400 range. That’s still a good chunk of change, but it can get you a card with close to 90 percent of the performance of high-end cards.

    That’s certainly true of EVGA’s GTX 470 SC. Built on a cut-down version of Nvidia’s high-end, DirectX 11 GPU, this card posted eyebrow-raising benchmarks, pretty much putting it into a class of its own.

    EVGA’s super-clocked GTX 470 GPU ships with 448 shader processors, running at 625MHz, with a shader clock of 1,280MHz. That’s a 3 percent faster core clock and 2.5 percent faster memory frequencies than the stock GTX 470. (The GTX 480 uses 480 shader processors at 700MHz). The 320-bit-wide memory interface pumps data to 1,280MB of GDDR5 running at 850MHz (3,400MHz effective.) Of course, the card supports the usual set of Nvidia features, including hardware SLI, PhysX acceleration, and 3D Vision Surround video.

    Continue reading this review after the jump.

    » Read More
    avatar

    Asus ENGTX480 Review

    Posted 06/11/2010 at 8:19am | by Loyd Case
    11
    Comments

    Just about everyone knows that Nvidia’s hot new Fermi graphics chip is literally hot. So, when Asus bundled its new ENGTX480 card with a custom voltage tweaker for overclocking, we wondered if it was such a good idea.

    After all, do you really need the card to run hotter? And with the speed of the ENGTX480, you probably don’t need the higher clocks anyway. The ENGTX480 ships with 32 shader processors (what Nvidia calls “CUDA cores”) disabled, yet the card still manages to be the fastest single-GPU card you can buy today.

    Continue reading this review after the jump.

    » Read More
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    XFX Radeon HD 5830 Review

    Posted 06/07/2010 at 9:45am | by Loyd Case
    4
    Comments

    You have to give AMD credit for trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

    The Radeon HD 5830 is the odd duck of AMD’s 5000-series GPUs. The card itself is as long as the high-end HD 5870, and consumes more power at idle than the Radeon HD 5850. But that’s what you’d expect of a card built on a “salvaged” chip.

    Salvaged chips are produced by taking chips that fail to pass muster as the highest-end part and selling them as lower-end parts. This can be seen in the Radeon HD 5830, which has 1,120 stream processors active, as opposed to 1,440 for the HD 5850 or 1,600 for the 5870.

    Unlike AMD’s lower-end HD 5770, which uses the Juniper GPU, with 1.05 billion transistors and 800 stream processors, the 5830 sports the same 2.15-billion-transistor GPU as the 5870/5850, with more functional units disabled.

    Continue reading this review after the jump.

    » Read More
    avatar

    XFX Radeon HD 5870 XXX Edition Review

    Posted 04/26/2010 at 2:53pm | by Loyd Case
    5
    Comments

    We’ve never been major advocates of GPU overclocking, as the minor gains you achieve often don’t justify the added heat and instability. But there’s a clear difference between Billy Joe doing a maximum overclock on his GPU and a vendor overclocking the part at the factory.

    So when XFX offered up its XXX Edition of the already-fast Radeon HD 5870, we were naturally curious. XFX pushes the HD 5870 to 875MHz (3 percent over the stock 850MHz) and juices the memory to 1,300MHz (8.3 percent over the stock 1,200MHz). At first blush, a 3 percent core overclock seems minimal. Given that the card costs about $430, versus about $405 for the stock XFX variant, is it worth the extra jingle?

    To find out, we compared the performance of the XXX Edition to a standard XFX Radeon HD 5870, which is a stock card in every respect. Save for clock speeds, the two cards are identical: memory (1GB), ports (two DVI, one DisplayPort, one HDMI), and the reference cooling system. Because of the speed bumps to the XXX Edition’s core and memory clocks, its system idle power usage varies from the stock card, reaching 148W versus 141W.

    Continue reading this review after the jump.

    » Read More
    avatar

    XFX Radeon HD 5670

    Posted 03/18/2010 at 3:12pm | by Loyd Case
    7
    Comments

    Can you get great gaming performance for $99? That’s the burning question we wanted to answer when the XFX Radeon HD 5670 arrived. The version we tested, with 512MB of GDDR5, can be found for just under a hundred buckazoids on the web. The other question: How well does it stack up against a similarly priced Nvidia card?

    Like other Radeon 5000 series GPUs, the 5670 chip is built on a 40nm manufacturing process. For those still trying to wrap their heads around the huge size of the Radeon HD 5970, the 5670 is a mere 6.5 inches long, occupies just a single PCI-E slot, and has no requirements for a power connector. The two cards, of course, are not in the same class.

    The HD 5670 has half the stream processors, texture units, and ROPs of the Radeon HD 5770. The GPU core is also clocked lower, as is the GDDR5 memory. With these specs, we expected something to give when running games. Sure enough, when we tried running modern games at 1680x1050 at high detail, the frame rates were unacceptable. Antialiasing? No way.

    Continue reading this review after the jump.

    » Read More
    avatar

    XFX Radeon HD 5970

    Posted 02/11/2010 at 12:15pm | by Loyd Case
    25
    Comments

    The recipe: Take two of the fastest GPUs on the planet capable of running DirectX 11, specially chosen for their low voltage leakage. Toss in two gigabytes of high-speed GDDR5 memory. Mix all ingredients into a card with high-end Japanese solid capacitors and a souped-up thermal dissipation system. The result: the XFX Radeon HD 5970—a GPU so yummy, you may even go back for seconds.

    While the product name doesn’t hint at the card’s dual-GPU nature, there’s no mistaking the presence of two graphics chips when you check out the back of the board. Then there’s the sheer size of it: At more than 12 inches, you’ll need a high-end PC case that’s deep enough to handle this monster. You’ll need a beefy power supply, too, since the HD 5970 burns 294W at full throttle—and that’s if you don’t overclock it. The good news is the card consumes just 42W at idle, less than double the idle power of a single HD 5870, thanks to an enhanced deep-sleep mode for the slave GPU.

    Continue reading this review after the jump.

    » Read More
    avatar

    HIS Radeon HD 5770

    Posted 11/16/2009 at 10:14am | by Loyd Case
    2
    Comments

    AMD has wasted no time bringing its DirectX 11 GPU architecture to a more affordable, mainstream-class GPU in the HD 5770. HIS is one of the first manufacturers to bring the HD 5770 to market.

    At around $160, the card is priced similarly to existing Radeon HD 4870 cards. It’s the lowest-cost card in the roundup, and given the 180mm2 die size (that’s incredibly tiny for a GPU), prices are likely to eventually come down even further.

     

    Read on for the full review!

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    avatar

    Gigabyte 260 GTX Super OC

    Posted 11/16/2009 at 10:09am | by Loyd Case
    0
    Comments

    It’s easy to be seduced by the latest and greatest graphics cards, but you can sometimes find excellent deals in older-generation cards that can still keep up with today’s shader-heavy PC games. Gigabyte’s 260 GTX SuperOC is a good example.

    To make the cards, Gigabyte starts with cherry-picked 260 GTX chips from the factory. Then it clocks the GPUs at 680MHz, more than 100MHz faster than the standard 576MHz. Similarly, the SuperOC pushes the shader clock to 1,466MHz, instead of the stock 1,350MHz. Rounding off the performance push is 896MB of GDDR3 running at 1.25GHz instead of 1GHz. Gigabyte delivers these rarefied clock rates at slightly less than $200.

     

    Read on for the full review!

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    avatar

    Sapphire Radeon HD 5850

    Posted 11/16/2009 at 9:59am | by Loyd Case
    0
    Comments

    As with Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870, the company’s HD 5850 card ships with coupons for two games: Dirt 2 and Battlestations: Pacific. Sapphire’s HD 5850 delivers a stock Radeon HD 5850, with its 1,440 stream processors, 72 texture units, and DirectX 11 support.

    In our power-usage testing, Sapphire’s power draw was about average for an HD 5850. Our system power averaged 140W at idle, while pushing 260W at full throttle. Fan noise was fairly loud at full bore, but that was generally true of all the cards. At idle, overall noise levels were low enough to blend into the background of CPU, power supply, and case cooling.

     

    Read on for the full review!

    » Read More
    avatar

    Diamond Radeon HD 5850

    Posted 11/16/2009 at 9:49am | by Loyd Case
    0
    Comments

    We admit to mixed feelings about Diamond’s Radeon HD 5850. On one hand, it offers the same strong performance as other Radeon HD 5850 cards—second only to their big-brother HD 5870 cards. But unlike other manufacturers, you don’t get a coupon for Dirt 2 in the box. Instead, you need to register the card at Diamond’s website to get the perk. You also won’t get the two-year warranty unless you register the card.

     

    Read on for the full review!

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