|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Testing To test the Sapphire Hd
4870 Toxic, I will be using a mix of synthetic and gaming
benchmarks.
For the gaming portion, I am going to
look at FarCry 2, Crysis:Warhead, Unreal Tournament 3, Company of
Heroes and World in Conflict. For Synthetic benchmarks I will
be using the FutureMark products and Cinebench. For the duration of
testing, I will be using the following test platform:
To compare the HD4870 to our current setup, I will be testing against my favorite HD3870 X2, the VisionTek HD3870 X2 OC Edition. The VisionTek design uses a large heatsink solution that is known to cause problems fitting into smaller cases. As you can see from this picture the HD4870 is slightly longer and taller.
To establish a solid baseline I captured this page from GPU-Z Ver. 0.3.1. The stock clocks for an HD4870 are set to 750MHz and 900 MHz respectively. Sapphires more aggressive clock speeds of 780 MHz for the GPU and 1000MHz for the GDDR5 should provide a nice boost over the reference designs (and our 3870 X2 as well). Most factory overclocked cards leave little room for additional overclocking, but I will give the Toxic a go before we are done! The Synthetic Benchmarks Synthetic testing is an easy way to compare cards with most test available in free or trial versions for your home use. Each benchmark was run using the default settings after a fresh boot of the test system unless noted. I ran the benchmark a minimum of three times and took the highest score. More tests are run if a large variance is discovered. All testing was done using the latest ATI drivers version 8.12. As with any benchmark, your results may vary. 3DMark Vantage 
3DMark® Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark® Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft. 3DMark Vantage can also test your video card in several different ways.
Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage X is probably the benchmark that best reflects current high-end gaming scenarios, testing was performed using the three top test settings. Here I have the settings run using the X or Extreme settings. As you can see the HD4870 Toxic dominates the HD3870 both over all and the critical GPU while just edging out the previous champ's dual GPU HD3870 in the CPU benchmark.
Vantage H or High setting is more representative of mainstream gaming than the X benchmark. The HD4870 Toxic nicely edges out our HD3870 X2 in every category. 3DMark06:
I will be using Version 1.1.0 professional. The free downloadable version can be found here.
Despite the newer 3DMark Vantage becoming the standard for benching, these scores will show you how the test setup might compare to some of the other older cards out there. The lack of support for many of the new technologies does nullify the advantages of the new 4870 design so take these scores with a grain of salt.
|
