Published: August 19, 2008 | Source: ASUS | Author: James Napier

ASUS HD 4870 X2 (EAH4870X2) 2GB PCI-E

Test Setup

A common mistake made when benchmarking graphics cards is that the rest of the PC system isn’t sufficient enough to test the GPU to its limits. This results in a bottleneck situation, where the system can only run at the speed of its slowest component. For this reason, the test configuration chosen below has been specially selected to give each of the graphics cards on test the headroom they require in order to produce the best results.

A selection of games and benchmark suites has also been chosen to test each of the cards with several game engines. Each of the cards will be run at both low, medium and high resolutions with varying levels of texture filtering to represent the use of the card with both small and large screen sizes.

3DMark05
1024×768 / 0xAA / 0xAF (Default)
1600×1200 / 4xAA / 0xAF
1920×1200 / 4xAA / 0xAF

3DMark 06
1280×1024 / 0xAA / 0xAF (Default)
1600×1200 / 4xAA / 0xAF
1920×1200 / 4xAA / 0xAF

3DMark Vantage
Performance Mode
High Mode
Extreme Mode

Enemy Territory:Quake Wars
1280×1024 / Max+Ultra / 8xAA
1600×1200 / Max+Ultra / 8xAA
1920×1200 / Max+Ultra / 8xAA

Unreal Tournament III
1280×1024 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 16xAF
1600×1200 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 16xAF
1920×1200 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 16xAF

Call of Duty 4
1280×1024 / Max / 4xAA
1600×1200 / Max / 4xAA
1920×1200 / Max / 4xAA

F.E.A.R
1280×1024 / Max / 4xAA
1600×1200 / Max / 4xAA
1920×1200 / Max / 4xAA

Racedriver GRID
1280×1024 / Ultra / 4xAA
1600×1200 / Ultra / 4xAA
1920×1200 / Ultra / 4xAA

Crysis
1280×1024 / DX10 / Very High / 4xAA
1600×1200 / DX10 / Very High / 4xAA
1920×1200 / DX10 / Very High / 4xAA

During the benchmarking phase, we will be using the following prices extracted from aria.co.uk on 17/08/08 to produce our CPF (Cost Per Frame) graphs. Please remember that these graphs are static and only represent a snapshot of the market at the time of this review.

ASUS GTX280 – Â£293.69
ASUS HD 4870X2 – Â£347.74

Overclocking

Using only the the ATI Overdriveâ„¢ facility built into the driver control panel, the maximum overclock we were able to obtain from the ASUS 4870X2Â was 777mhz on the core and 975mhz on the memory. The Overdrive facility did actually attempt to overclock the card higher than this using the “Auto-Tune” option, but unfortunately these settings proved to be unstable when attempting to run 3DMark Vantage.

Interestingly, with this overclock applied our scores on 3DMark Vantage actually dropped! This is normally indicative of unstable settings, but during testing no artifacting was observed and further reducing the overclock settings didn’t appear to improve the situation. We can only assume that this was a possible issue with the Catalyst 8.8 drivers or the GPU’s were simply getting too hot.

Power Usage

Using what’s commonly known as a “Power Angel” to record the power consumption of the entire system by placing the device between the test systems plug and the mains outlet, we were able to record the following results. Idle power was taken after the system had been given around 10 minutes to settle after powering on, whereas load consumption was taken during a 10 minute test session with rthdribl.

Bearing in mind that the results below are for the ENTIRE SYSTEM and not just the GPU, its clear to see that the GTX280 is able to throttle its power consumption down considerably lower than the 4870X2 when in a desktop environment. This is also true once a heavy load is applied to the GPU’s, with the 4870X2 rocketing to 409w – almost 80w higher than the GTX280.