Sapphire HD6870 idle frequencies

[dnLL]

bah, as I've said, my HD5770 was completely quiet.

my HD6870 is completely quiet with the fan at 22% (or less). which means idle temp at 44C with one monitor, or 60C with 3 monitors, or 69C O/Ced with 3 monitors.

I don't really understand why the card cannot downclock with 3 screens. it's working nice with 1050MHz, now that I'm overclocked to 1175MHz, I'm stuck there, idle or load. if at least it would downclock back to 1050MHz. I'm pretty sure that it would work at 600 MHz too.

maybe I still can try to mod the BIOS? the card itself is okay, it's just how it supports dual monitors that is a little bit weird.

 

[cadaveca]

You know, I've gotten kinda leary of bios edits.

For example, my card, idles @ 400/1250 on desktop.

But if I use a video player with vga acceleration, clocks go to 400/900, so i get lower temps...than idle?





Make sure you investigate all usage patterns before modding the bios.

 

[dnLL]

well, I won't leave VLC or MPC running with a 1080p movie in background to lower my idle clocks, lol

I cannot believe that there is no solution.

 

[cadaveca]

Well, as Wizzard mentioned, refresh rates on the monitors, allthough the same rate, do not occur at precisely the same time. This behavior is what leads to flicker and other stuff, so the only way to avoid it when using multiple monitors is the increased clocks.

It sucks, but it's the best AMD could come up with. I've been dealing with cursor corruption when using displayport, over many different cards, since launch, and there has yet to be a fix(nor do I think there will ever be one until the display hardware on the cards changes signifigantly).

IF there was another option, I'm sure AMD would have taken steps to inplement it. Because even @ the raised clocks, I still get flicker on secondary monitors when clocks change.

 

[dnLL]

talking of the mouse, as soon as my cursor is over the hour (bottom right of the right screen), there is a little white bar to te left that is flickering. strange bug.

I will probably ending up with a SLI of GTX460 w/ Surround. my friend has 2 monitors and his GTS450 still idles at 51 MHz (wow, that's even lower)

 

[cadaveca]

try 470 or 480, 460 isn't quite enough grunt, IMHO.

 

[dnLL]

eh, GTX460 SLI is actually a lot better than my HD6870. only one GTX460 is almost on par with it. the card is already ~200$ (the 1GB version).

 

[cadaveca]

Yeah, they are in direct competition. I do not think dual 6870 or 5970 is enough, either, actually. I've been doing the tri-mon thing for some time now(over a year, I guess), and I don't really think any hardware is really up to the task...current cards run into cpu limits, os we need far faster cards still. I hope Cayman/Antilles may be those cards, because the boost rumoured for GTX580 isn't going to be enough, IMHO.

 

[dnLL]

I've been playing on 3 monitors with my HD5770 for 6 months. You cannot imagine how my HD6870 is actually enough for me (I'm able to run DiRT2 w/ everything maxed out except 4xAA). Don't forget that I'm playing with 3x1680x1050. It's a little bit less pixels than Full HD resolutions.

A GTS450 SLI would be a little bit better than my HD6870 also. I will wait until Q1 2011 anyway, my P5Q-E is starting to be old and doesn't support SLI.

Maybe I will find a better card on the ATI side before this. If the only problem is the cursor, I don't care that much. But 65C idle temp is so much...

 

[cadaveca]

yeah, @ 1680, you're in a completely differnt performance segment than I am.

I am pretty confident the cursor corruption issue on AMD will end using either daisy-chained DP, or the multi-stream boxes. But the question remains on whether these will be included with card, or will be an extra expense. That expense isn't so bad, maybe, as nV requires two cards, anyway...

I decided to hold off on the multi-mon aspect of gaming for a few months until all the new products come out, and then I'll make a choice as to what I buy.

I mean really, @ 1680x1050, you could use almost any single "high-end" card, and a Matroc TH2G. But that's the max res the TH2G supports...so you've got more options than I do.