Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

ATI’s latest AIBs get a workout on Vantage

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 22nd 2008 | Comments Closed
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ATI’s HD4870 and HD4850 X2 AIBs.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Working end of the ATI AIBs.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 1: Comparison of ATI and Nvidia AIBs running Vantage.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 2: Price/performance comparison of AIBs running Vantage.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)

This week, we received some more ATI AIBs, specifically a pair of Sapphire Radeon AIBs, and a pair of 1 GB HD 4870 AIBs. We also got a new Catalyst driver, so we decided to run the batch of them, including the 512 MB 4870s, for comparison.

We stuck with Vantage for these tests since it is the only truly stable and repeatable benchmark we have. We’re still experimenting with getting a stable in-game benchmark, and right now it looks like the opening scene in Crysis Warhead and Crytek’s FarCry2 are the best hope for that.

The 4870 1GB and 512MB boards look alike, whereas the 4850 X2s are a bit longer, as might be expected.

The Sapphire financial HD 4850 X2, in addition to having two GPUs, has four DVI connectors, meaning one AIB could drive four monitors simultaneously, which should delight simulator players, and probably traders.

We dropped these puppies into the Nehalem i7 core 965 Extreme and ran the tests, or at least tried to run the tests. Some just wouldn’t run.

Three Nvidia GTX 280 AIBs gave the best performance, just barely beating two dual GPU ATI HD 4870 X2s, but all that horsepower costs money, and is it worth it? We priced the AIBs and found the following:

As Table 1 shows, the best value in terms of price/performance is the Nvidia GTX 260 Core 216.

As Figure 2 shows, a Nvidia GTX 260 gives the most bank for the buck. However, if you want more graphics performance, then a pair of ATI Radeon HD4870 X2s are the choice. For a great middle choice, a pair of ATI Radeon HD4850 X2s give good performance for the price. We going to keep working on this and add in-game scores once we get a stable, repeatable in-game run through.