Big GPU Shootout – Revisited
Conclusion
It is interesting to return to an older review and update it many months later. We added 4 video cards that helped to fill in the picture from our first GPU Shootout – that last generation’s top cards can barely run 1440×900 DX10 maxed out gaming – never mind the 8800 GTS, 9800 GTS, HD 2900 and HD 3800 series. We also noted that the 8800 GTX is still very capable as a midrange video card; it is often able to trade blows with and even beat the later-released 9800 GT and GTS 250 series.
Since the HD 4890 is now often priced below $200, there is little reason to hold back on upgrading from an older series card for today’s games. Two HD 4890s paired in CrossFire offer a great value and even the older series HD 4870-X2 has always been able to easily top Nvidia’s GTX 280 – now eclipsed by the GTX 285.
In the last review with Catalyst 9-4, we saw CrossFire-X scaling exposed. Two “mismatched” cards in ‘FrankenFire’ do not necessarily default to the slower card’s speeds but the slower one generally contributes to the overall performance as the load is balanced between them as well as the drivers are capable with that particular game. Our Diamond HD 4890-XOC has proved worthy of our “Editor’s Award” as it shows excellent scaling over the stock HIS HD 4890.
Our results are very consistent and we carried on where our Diamond HD 4890-xOC Preview, Part 1 and Part 2 left off. We saw Diamond’s overclocked HD 4890-XOC coming on very strongly to replace the HD 4870 as AMD’s top single-GPU. We saw the HD 4890-XOC even trade blows with Nvidia’s now second-fastest single GPU, the GTX280. We are most impressed and highly recommend Diamond’s HD 4890-XOC as offering great bang-for-buck!
If you are going to pick the most bang for buck in a multi-GPU configuration, overclocked HD 4890 CrossFire should be your first choice. If you already have an HD 4870 and especially if it is overclockable, you might consider pairing it with the fastest HD 4890 that you can find as this mismatched CrossFire-X pair comes reasonably close in a lot of the benches to “true” HD 4890 CrossFire and is faster than an HD 4870-X2 or HD 4870 CrossFire.
Our “Shoot-out Series” has been a steady progression examining Intel’s Penryn platform, and we have been upgrading it as necessary to maximize our PC’s gaming performance and to chart those improvements for you. Part IV, The Summary, showed this by comparing drivers all the way back to August 2008 when we first began benchmarking and focusing on the progress each vendors has made since then.
In our installment of Part III, Big GPU Shootout, PCIe 1.0 vs. PCIe 2.0, we especially focused on the motherboard’s effects on video card performance, using the extremes – P35 PCIe 1.0 vs. X48 PCIe 2.0. We saw how limiting the older motherboard’s PCIe bandwidth can be in certain situations and so we upgraded to X48.
Part II – The Big GPU Shoot-Out – Setting New Benches – demonstrated the need for overclocking our E8600 CPU from its stock 3.33 GHz to 4.0 GHz to take full advantage of our new video cards.
Part I, The Big GPU Shootout: Upgrade Now or Wait? we examined the performance of five video cards. We realized that the last generation’s video cards are not sufficient for today’s DX10 maxed-out gaming. Since our Q9550S review article, we now use Core 2 Quad Q9550S and recommend it highly! We also started to bench with CrossFireX-3 in Part I which ran on fairly immature Catalyst 8-8 drivers at the time and we have continued to chart its progress until now.
Stay tuned. We think we will have some very interesting articles for you to read as you plan your own coming upgrades. Well, we are done with this second part of our series, “Big GPU shootout – revisited”, and we plan to update it in the future – with many more video cards and game benchmarks than now.
Our next project is to build a new “value” quad core PC with Cooler Master and AMD and to compare it with our current Intel Penryn platform featuring Q9550S at 3.1 and 4.0 GHz. You can expect a preview of our new value series of articles in a few days and there is already a topic on our forums – New AMD Build – Unlocking and Overclocking Phenom II 550 X-2 to X4 – 4 GHz or Bust!! Feel free to participate and perhaps to make requests for what you would like to see us focus on for this next series that we are doing right now.
In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forum. We want you to join us and Live in Our World. It is fast expanding and we think you will like what you progressively discover here.
Mark Poppin
ABT editor
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