ASUS EAH5870 - "Unofficial" Review

[Johnny C]

Coolest running cards out highend by alot.:)

Cool running means that they have lots of clocks left in them.....for the 5890 version.

[Razor3DC]

Hi Mike,

I think it's not possible to measure power consumption by software.
But one indicator schould be the clocks of the card.

If they're not going up, when connecting more than one device it should be the first right step on the way.
Looking at your last screen of the panel, the card should keep the really nice core/memory clock of 157/300...

By the way: I LOVE your 'unofficial' test... there is nothing above real user experience!

Razor
Hi Mike,

do you got new info about idle-clocks with more than one monitor attached?
Many thanks for your investigation!

Razor

[MikeC]

It's been a busy week and I haven't had much time to devote to testing. I did however, run a few tests using the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky benchmark. The benchmark does not require that the game be installed and can be downloaded for comparison purposes.

http://cs.stalker-game.com/en/?page=news&item=119

The benchmark is based on one of the in-game locations – Marshland. The testing process includes four stages, those utilizing various weather and time of the day settings (day, night, rain, bright sun). In order to test your system thoroughly the benchmark is provided with a number of presets and options including different versions of DirectX (9.0, 10.0, 10.1), screen resolutions, antialiasing etc, all at your disposal.

The results are based on DirectX 10.

Day

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/stalker_day.jpg

Sunshafts

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/stalker_sunshafts.jpg

Night

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/stalker_night.jpg

Rain

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/stalker_rain.jpg


Average frame rate looks good. Somewhat concerned with minimum frame rate.

Default Setting - 1680, 1920, and 2560

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/benchmarks/stalker_default.png

High Setting - 1680, 1920, and 2560

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/benchmarks/stalker_high.png

Extreme Setting - 1680, 1920, and 2560

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/benchmarks/stalker_extreme.png

Links to other Radeon 5870 reviews that used the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky benchmark:

bit-tech (http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/09/23/ait-radeon-hd-5870-1gb-review/4)
FiringSquad (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_hd_5870_performance_preview/page13.asp)
Nordic Hardware (http://www.nordichardware.com/Reviews/?page=17&skrivelse=560)
PC Games Hardware (http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,696698/Ati-Radeon-HD-5850/5870-Crossfire-vs-Nvidia-Geforce-GTX-285-SLI-Multi-GPU-Shootout/Reviews/?page=10)
Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5870,2422-12.html)
TweakTown (http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/2933/sapphire_radeon_hd_5870_1gb_graphics_card/index10.html)

[mailman2]

This card it too powerful to NOT use AA in any game. I absolutely love mine and AA @ 1680 is almost free in most games.

[Razor3DC]

Hi Mike,

do you got new info about idle-clocks with more than one monitor attached?
Many thanks for your investigation!

Razor
OK, HT4U cleared this up!

Idle-Power with one display = 21W
Idle-Power with more displays = 53W
Thats a plus of a hefty 150%!

http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_ati_radeon_hd5870_part2/index4.php
automatic translated: http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fht4u.net%2Freviews%2F2009 %2Famd_ati_radeon_hd5870_part2%2Findex4.php&sl=de&tl=en&hl=de&ie=UTF-8

Greets
Razor

[MikeC]

Another downloadable benchmark that's freely available is the Crysis Warhead Benchmark Tool (http://downloads.guru3d.com/Crysis-WARHEAD-Benchmark-Tool-BETA-download-2072.html).

The average frame rate in Crysis Warhead under DX9 was over 60 fps at the first three results. The frame rate dropped to 47 fps at 1920x1200 w/4x antialiasing and at 2560x1600 with no aa, the average fell to 39 fps.

As expected, be prepared for a drop in performance under DirectX 10, which offers graphics improvements.

Ambush
http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/crysis_war_dx9.jpg

These results are from the ambush level with the Gamer setting under DirectX 9 and 10. ambush has a number of special effects like fire, smoke, explosions, particles, ragdoll physics, water, etc.

Gamer Setting - DX9 vs. DX10

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/benchmarks/crysis_war_gamer.png

Extreme Setting - DX10

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/benchmarks/crysis_war_extreme.png

[MikeC]

The Resident Evil 5 benchmark is available in the demo version of the game. Grab a copy here: http://downloads.guru3d.com/Resident-Evil-5-PC-Benchmark-Utility-download-2331.html


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http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/re5.jpg

Average frame rate only. Good performance across all resolutions. Motion blur on.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/benchmarks/re5.png

[HYBRID]

http://i38.tinypic.com/2hqtp2f.jpg

Here's a picture of my 5870 Crossfire in an 800D Corsair case.

[K007]

wow nice cable management...i really gotta sort mine out its a jungle in there.

[MikeC]

Installed the Risen demo, which is the successor to Gothic 3 (RPG).

http://www.bigdownload.com/games/risen/pc/risen-demo/

Initial impressions: Gamplay was smooth at all resolutions.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/risen_1.jpg

No issue with these results:

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/benchmarks/risen_gameplay.png

[MikeC]

Next game looks to be Wolfenstein :maxshoot:

Grab the demo here - http://www.bigdownload.com/games/wolfenstein/pc/wolfenstein-demo/


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Wolfenstein plays great. Graphics engine not as demanding, but able to use 2560x1600 with 8x AA at steady 60 fps.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/wolf.jpg

[mullet]

MikeC, awesome job dude. Graphs look good as well.

[LordJuanlo]

Average fps in Risen with 4xSSAA is out of this world, are you sure SSAA is working?. It performs almost the same than no AA

[MikeC]

MikeC, awesome job dude. Graphs look good as well.Thanks. Having fun too :D

[MikeC]

Average fps in Risen with 4xSSAA is out of this world, are you sure SSAA is working?. It performs almost the same than no AADidn't run a detailed analysis of image quality, but it did impact performance a bit. Something to follow up on though :)

[MikeC]

There's a graphics glitch with the Witcher. Performance seemed good though.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/witcher_glitch.jpg

[K007]

thats what my 4870 did at first....then later evolved into other games. memory issue.

sure thats a game bug?

[MikeC]

thats what my 4870 did at first....then later evolved into other games. memory issue.

sure thats a game bug?Probably an OpenGL driver issue. I noticed a similar problem on a Radeon 9800 Pro :)

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/soltek_qbic_eq3702m/page_7.shtml

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/soltek_qbic_eq3702m/cod_radeon_1s.jpg

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/soltek_qbic_eq3702m/cod_radeon_2s.jpg

[K007]

witcher is opengl?

[Viral]

My mates 4850 would do similar things in Fallout 3 when he first started playing it. Don't think he saw it again after a while (driver update?) and it wasn't in any other games.

[HYBRID]

MikeC I downloaded the Wolf demo but the head bobbing was hard to take for long periods of time. Nice information and great graphs Mike.

[MustangSVT]

thats what my 4870 did at first....then later evolved into other games. memory issue.

sure thats a game bug?

I had similar problem in The Witcher with AA enabled so I disabled AA.

[MikeC]

MikeC I downloaded the Wolf demo but the head bobbing was hard to take for long periods of time. Nice information and great graphs Mike.Thanks. As for the headbobbing, it can eliminated by adding the line seta g_noViewBob "1" in the wolf.cfg file.

The wolf.cfg file is located here on Vista:

\users\"username"\appdata\local\id software\wolfsp\base\wolf.cfg

[K007]

the head bobbing in wolf is really bad. i thought people were exaggerating about it, but it feels like they took the mw1 and and times it by 10.

[MikeC]

It's been almost three months since I posted in this thread, but I've been off from work for most of the past two weeks celebrating the holiday season.

Before hooking up with my guild last night in Guild Wars, I re-installed the ASUS EAH5870 along with the latest Catalyst drivers.

The graphics engine in Guild Wars is based on the DirectX 8 API and the game is certainly not the most stressful. I think that award continues to belong to Crysis :)

However, this gave me an opportunity to crank up the graphics to extreme settings - 2560x1600 with 4x supersampling antialising and the highest quality in-game graphics.

Other than areas where heavy smoke effects occurred, the game was perfectly playable. Even more impressive was the GPU tempearature, which hovered around 66 degrees Celsius with the fan speed at 28% capacity as shown in the thumbnail below.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/guild_wars_temp_s.gif

Click the link below for a full size screenshot.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/asus_eah5870/images/guild_wars_temp.gif

One feature that I value is a GPU that runs at lower temperatures and is reasonably quiet under stress. I have to admit that the Radeon 5870 meets this requirement. My experience with previous graphics cards based on high-end Radeon GPUs was they ran hot and fan noise was annoyingly loud. Not so with the 5870.

It will be interesting to see how NVIDIA's next-gen responds in this area.