Page 3: Installation, Testing
Installation:
The card was installed in my standard test system for graphics. The Asus P5E3 Deluxe had no problems accommodating this graphics card and an Antec NeoHE 550 Watt PSU was more than adequate to give enough power even using the dual connection. I suggest that your case has proper ventilation since this card throws off a load of heat, much more than the 4850. The difference is that the 4870 pumps most of it outside of the case anyway due to the dual slot design.
Since there are no Linux drivers on the CD, I went to the AMD driver website to get the latest Catalyst drivers for Linux which were Catalyst 8.7 at the time of this review. The Catalyst Linux driver releases are following the standard monthly cycle. The 4850 review I did used Catalyst 8.6 drivers and just a short time later we have a brand new set of drivers. You cannot compare numbers to the previous review due to new testing methods.
Catalyst Control Center:
Continuing the show off of the Linux Catalyst Control Center, I want to show off the monitor portion of the driver control panel. The fglrx driver is making strides and I commend the ATI programmers for starting the open source push. An employee from AMD informed me that ATI had the plan in place to bring parity to fglrx with their Windows drivers long before the acquisition. This driver uses the OpenGL 2.1.7769 Release and the driver version is 8.51.3.
This first shot shows the resolution and the display modes. If I had a second monitor connected, it would be more helpful. The fglrx driver supports dual monitors (or more, haven't tried). It supports the range of display modes when you have two monitors. The second shot shows some scaling options for the monitor.
Testing:
All testing on ASE Labs is done with the current version of Ubuntu (8.04 at the time of this writing). The 4870 was tested with the newest Catalyst 8.7 drivers that were just released from ATI's site. The Catalyst Control Center was also installed along side. An Asus P5E3 Deluxe with 2GB of Kingston PC3-14400 RAM and a Core 2 Quad Q6600 running at 2.7GHz (1800MHz FSB) was used for testing. A »Sapphire 3870 Toxic and the »4850 were used as a comparison for this card. The blue bar indicates the 4870 while the light gray denotes the 4850 and the dark gray is the 3870. All games were run at 1920x1200. These are powerful graphics cards and the higher resolution, the better.
Nexuiz and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be used to test games while GTKperf will test 2D performance. I've retired the SPEC synthetic benchmark due to the results not being that accurate for testing.
For the first benchmark, we are using demo1 from Nexuiz. The cards are being forced to run at 16xAF and 8xAA (Box). Using this you can see a slight lead over the 4850.
The card was installed in my standard test system for graphics. The Asus P5E3 Deluxe had no problems accommodating this graphics card and an Antec NeoHE 550 Watt PSU was more than adequate to give enough power even using the dual connection. I suggest that your case has proper ventilation since this card throws off a load of heat, much more than the 4850. The difference is that the 4870 pumps most of it outside of the case anyway due to the dual slot design.
Since there are no Linux drivers on the CD, I went to the AMD driver website to get the latest Catalyst drivers for Linux which were Catalyst 8.7 at the time of this review. The Catalyst Linux driver releases are following the standard monthly cycle. The 4850 review I did used Catalyst 8.6 drivers and just a short time later we have a brand new set of drivers. You cannot compare numbers to the previous review due to new testing methods.
Catalyst Control Center:
Continuing the show off of the Linux Catalyst Control Center, I want to show off the monitor portion of the driver control panel. The fglrx driver is making strides and I commend the ATI programmers for starting the open source push. An employee from AMD informed me that ATI had the plan in place to bring parity to fglrx with their Windows drivers long before the acquisition. This driver uses the OpenGL 2.1.7769 Release and the driver version is 8.51.3.
This first shot shows the resolution and the display modes. If I had a second monitor connected, it would be more helpful. The fglrx driver supports dual monitors (or more, haven't tried). It supports the range of display modes when you have two monitors. The second shot shows some scaling options for the monitor.
Testing:
All testing on ASE Labs is done with the current version of Ubuntu (8.04 at the time of this writing). The 4870 was tested with the newest Catalyst 8.7 drivers that were just released from ATI's site. The Catalyst Control Center was also installed along side. An Asus P5E3 Deluxe with 2GB of Kingston PC3-14400 RAM and a Core 2 Quad Q6600 running at 2.7GHz (1800MHz FSB) was used for testing. A »Sapphire 3870 Toxic and the »4850 were used as a comparison for this card. The blue bar indicates the 4870 while the light gray denotes the 4850 and the dark gray is the 3870. All games were run at 1920x1200. These are powerful graphics cards and the higher resolution, the better.
Nexuiz and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be used to test games while GTKperf will test 2D performance. I've retired the SPEC synthetic benchmark due to the results not being that accurate for testing.
For the first benchmark, we are using demo1 from Nexuiz. The cards are being forced to run at 16xAF and 8xAA (Box). Using this you can see a slight lead over the 4850.