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The planned hardware upgrades are coming along nicely. I was very lucky to nab a new graphic card this morning in what I thought was a bargain but later turned out to be a lucky misprint. Sucks for the reseller, but I was honestly not aware of the mistake and so I got my hands on the XFX Radeon HD 5850 "Black Edition" at almost 40% off of the going price. In fact I got it 20% cheaper than the cheapest "vanilla" HD 5850. And add to this the fact that the 5000 series is still to this day in short supply …
Of course under normal circumstances I’d never pay for a factory overclocked card like this. But I’m sure it’s good for something. I’ll save a few minutes not having to overclock it myself. Har har har. I’m not so sure about the cooling though. It’s the same cooler as every other 5850 out there. Adequate but not fantastic. Though from reviews I gather the card runs no noisier than at stock speeds. Don’t know about temperatures though. But you’d think XFX would do something at least to improve the cooler. Oh well, I might get an after market cooler at any rate. I’m going to have to test it first to see how it compares to my old 2900 Pro. Plus the situation with XFX and warranty after such as modification is a bit unclear. The last time I did this to a graphic card was the 9700.
I am obsessed with power consumption obviously so I’m hoping for something like this (cut and pasted from here, sorted by typical 3D consumption):
That is the theory at least. Unfortunately I don’t have data on the 2900 Pro peak power draw, but its typical 3D draw is so gigantic that measuring it seems fairly redundant. The point has been made. The 2900 series was awful. The 4890 and 4870 were awful too in their own way but at least they delivered a performance that could relate to their massive draw. And the 5000 series offers superior performance at decreased consumption. It’s like magic. We’ll see if Nvidia’s Fermi can match that.
Addendum: I got the card and have installed it. In terms of size it was as clumsy as the 2900 Pro. Though with the small difference that the power connectors on the 5850 are placed on the short end of the board. I can only say that it was a snug fit with the Gigabyte Aurora due to the 3.5” drive cage. On a side note I also had to do a complete geometric recalibration for my standard resolution (1280×960). Not just a nudge but the screen was a mile off to the left. The joy of CRTs …
In terms of performance I’m not much of benchmarker. I ran Furmark at 1280×960 8X for 120s and saw more or less exactly a tripling of frame rates. The GPU ran at 74 degrees C compared to 79 degrees for my old card. So in terms of temperatures I’m not that impressed. But Furmark is a bit synthetic, the card is mildly overclocked and I already knew the cooling was spartan at best. At least the fan is a tad quieter than on the 2900. Idle temps by the way are around 41 degrees which I think is pretty good.
Power consumption improved about as much as I had anticipated. I don’t have any fancy testing equipment so I can only use a kill-a-watt to approximate the total power consumption. For this particular setup, idle / desktop consumption dropped from 145 to 100 W or so. That is obviously with SpeedStep scaling down the frequency of the CPU. A particular 3D game dropped from 250 to 210 W. The Furmark test dropped from about 275 to 230 W. And that is with several times the performance obviously. Also, much to my surprise, the sleep / S3 STR consumption dropped dramatically from about 16 W to about 9 W. I had no idea that graphic cards contributed so much to S3 consumption.
All in all energy savings of up to 200 SEK per year give or take. An LCD monitor would probably cut down the costs by just as much. But all of this is obviously based on excessive use.
