Sapphire hd 2600 Pro - Ati Bloggo News 2010!

Conclusions - Part 1

The new ATI card is the last piece that was needed to complete the Radeon HD 5000 family; the DirectX 11 GPU line is now complete and covering all market segments, from the enthusiast to the entry-level.

At this point, nVIDIA hasn’t yet announced the launch date for their Fermi cards: so ATI can now enjoy a certain advantage when it comes to the technology, but not only. With the HD 5000 family, ATI wanted to keep the strategy that made the previous series, the HD 4800, a true victory: great performances for a rather competitive price.

Conclusion - Part 2

Also, Sapphire guarantees a very rich bundle that comes together with the fame of this brand that has been supplying good quality cards for a long time. Coming with the cards, users will find three games: Half-Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2, a copy of 3DMark06 and the Power DVD software.

ATI also offers, with the 2600 series, native support to the HDMI in all their models, while nVidia leaves it up to each manufacturer the choice on whether to offer it or not.

The 2600 series is thus indicated to those that want to save a little more money and yet have a card with superior video quality than the nVidia counterpart, although the performances are slightly inferior.

Noise and Energy Consumption

The Radeon HD 5570 features a very small active cooling system, its size makes it so that the fan must work harder to keep a constant temperature. For this reason, the card isn’t exactly as silent as it would be expected for a card on this price range, although the noise levels are nothing that would be too annoying for the users.

Also when it comes to the energy consumption, it’s worth to highlight the great job from ATI on that front. The card goes to a maximum consumption of 180 Watts when in full load, and a minimum of 130 Watts when in idle.

Temperatures

The choice of using an active heatsink shows its results when analysing the temperatures. For example, during a session of HAWX, the temperature goes up until 58°C in complete full load.

The fan makes it so that the temperature does not go over 60°C, keeping the GPU under the alert values. After the testing session, the cooling system brings the temperature to 50°C in a matter of seconds.

Devil May Cry

The tests were done using the demo version during the scene 2, with the maximum settings, DX 10 APIs and Anti-Aliasing 4x.

- 1920 x 1200 - 40
- 1680 x 1050 - 44
- 1280 x 1024 - 53

Crysis Warhead

For the tests, the Hocbench benchmark tools were used during the airfield map, high quality settings with Anisotropic filter 16x enabled through the benchmark, and no Anti-Aliasing.

- 1920 x 1200 - 6
- 1680 x 1050 - 8
- 1280 x 1024 - 10

As the tests have confirmed, the card places itself at a “lower” level, as it was supposed to be. ATI has indeed developed this card to be an affordable solution to those users that do not require extreme gaming quality, or that are occasional gamers.

The Last Remnant

The integrated benchmarking tool doesn’t allow the user to choose specific quality settings except for the video resolution.

- 1920 x 1200 - 28
- 1680 x 1050 - 35
- 1280 x 1024 - 50

DIRT 2

An automatic benchmark batch that needs to be executed from a command line. The settings were high, AA 4x and DirectX 10

- 1920 x 1200 - 23
- 1680 x 1050 - 26
- 1280 x 1024 - 32

S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Call of Prypat

The game has an automatic benchmarking tool. In the case of this test, we set the game without anti-aliasing, high quality and DX10, and the reference values are related to the average obtained on the “day” scenario.

Values expressed on FPS

- 1920 x 1200 - 25
- 1680 x 1050 - 28
- 1280 x 1024 - 34.4

Call of Duty 5

The test was done using Fraps, Anti-Aliasing 4x and all settings in the maximum values possible.

Values expressed in FPS

- 1920 x 1200 - 37
- 1680 x 1050 - 45
- 1280 x 1024 - 56

Game Tests

Tom Clancy’s HAWX

The tests were done using the integrated benchmark and the demo version, with all settings in high except for the low ambient occlusion.

Very High - AA 4x - DX10

- 1920 x 1200 - 69
- 1680 x 1050 - 81
- 1280 x 1024 - 98

Game Tests

Far Cry 2

The tests for Far Cry 2 were done with high quality, also enabling and disabling anti-aliasing 4x.

Far Cry 2 - High Quality - AA 4x - DX 10

Values are expressed in FPS

- 1920 x 1200 - 19
- 1680 x 1050 - 22
- 1280 x 1024 - 27

Quality Very High - No AA - DX10

- 1920 x 1200 - 24
- 1680 x 1050 - 27
- 1280 x 1024 - 31

World in Conflict

The tests were done using the integrated benchmark, with very high qualities, anti-aliasing 4x and anisotropic filter 16x.

Values are expressed in FPS

- 1920 x 1200 - 12
- 1680 x 1050 - 13
- 1280 x 1024 - 17

The behavior in those two games is within the expectations: developed on the RV830 GPU as the HD 5670, but with inferior frequencies and DDR3 memories instead of the GDDR5 ones, the HD 5570 doesn’t really reach the same performance levels. It’s a clear sign of exactly which market range it belongs to.

Test configuration

Considering the performances on the ATI Radeon HD 5570 and its initial “base” cost, the tests were done only at these resolutions: 1280 x 1024, 1680 x 1050 and 1920 x 1200 pixels.

In order to analyse the performances, an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme-based platform was used, with clock frequencies of 3.2 GHz and Turbo Mode enabled. The system also features 6 GB of RAM, with the frequencies of 1.600 Mhz, Driver ATI Catalyst 10.1 and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.