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Power Usage
To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we ran a demanding part of 3DMark06.
The 55nm fabrication process of the RV670 GPU helps keep the Gigabyte HD 3870 at a very reasonable level of power usage. A standard 400W-450W power supply would not very strained by having this card in your case -- unless, of course, you have other high-demand components, such as a multiple hard drives, or instance.
Overclocking
To be honest, my expectations for the overclocking of Gigabyte's HD 3870 were mixed. On the positive side of things, Gigabyte's quality "Ultra Durable 2" construction -- which consists of better-than-average ferrite core chokes, solid organic polymer capacitors, and lower switching resistance MOSFETs -- could do nothing but help overclocking; on the flip side, it isn't often that a enthusiaut-class video card does not have any sort of metal heat sinks on the memory chips.
My tredipation was well placed, as the GPU overclocked quite well, but the memory didn't achieve the level of overclock I was looking for. Nonetheless, a core speed of 889 MHz and a memory clock of 1089 (2178) MHz isn't that bad at all. This is a very reasonable overclock considering the default clock speed of a HD 3870 is 775 MHz, and 1000 (2000) for the memory. For comparison, our last HD 3870 we reviewed -- from VisionTek -- reached 884 MHz (core) / 1292 (2596) MHz. However, to be fair to Gigabyte, the VisionTek required the fan to be running at 100% for this VisionTek overclock to be stable, and was pretty loud at that setting, whereas even at 100% fan power for the Gigabyte HD 3870, the Zalman wasn't that loud at all.
Some enterprising overclockers out there might want to throw an old heatsink that they may have kicking around, right onto the memory and see what kind of new speeds they can reach. The memory chips are Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ1A's, which are rated to 1000 (2000) MHz. With proper cooling, you should not have trouble getting at least 200 MHz above that rated speed, I'd presume.
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I love this card at first sight. Gigabyte done very good job
Jeff17 -=> This is the only HD3870 with DDR3 as far as I know.
Also, the Powercolor HD3850 Xtreme PCS that was used in the benchmarks is a factory-overclocked, super-charged HD3850 that uses DDR4 memory. So, it is sort of a reverse match-up of what you might normally see... it is a bit surprising how close the two came in the benchmarks. The low memory clock of the Gigabyte 3870 definitely does not help the cards performance -- but this can be overcome by a reasonable overclock.
Here's an old post about the differences between GDDR3 and GDDR4 (stolen from a forum):
GDDR3 vs GDDR4
1) 7.2 vs 11.2 GBps per chip max data speed
2) 1.8 vs 2.8 GBps per pin max data rate
3) 1.8 vs 1.5 v minimum power consumption which results in a 20-25% energy savings
4) 2.1 vs 1.9 v maximum power for overclocking
5) 4 vs 8 bit burst length which allows more memory bandwidth and lower latency
6) no DBI vs DBI: Data Bus Inversion - it takes more energy to transfer 0s than 1s. When there are a lot of 0s to move, it will send them as 1s instead and then use DBI to signal that all those 1s needed to be flipped back to 0s. This is a power saving feature.
7) Three point voltage control via video card driver for fine tuning and overclocking
I haven't specifically tested for speed differences between GDDR3 and GDDR4 (hey not a bad idea for an article hmm..) but I can tell you, that it makes a significant difference, but not a HUGE difference. As in, the difference isn't big enough to make or break a card; it is only a small performance difference; but it is there.
BTW we are missing pictures throughout my last two video card reviews.
It seems that we are being hot-linked a lot more now, and that is somehow getting our pictures taken off the articles due to cache issues. Developer guys here at home base are checking it out and will be fixing the problem soon, most certainly.
I'm a bit confused. The review said the Gigabyte 3870 card was quiet. It's anything but unfortunately. The fan stays on 100% all the time. This would have been a great card if the fan was temperature controlled.
I'll be testing it tomorrow, so I'll investigate further and get back to you.
Worse case though, you could run a manual fan control program (such as riva tuner) and keep the fan running at %60 or %70 and you should be fine.
Oh and just btw, just checked out the card's price on newegg, and the first user review that popped up says the fan runs "nearly silent" so that also lends me to believe yours is misfiring somehow.
And you do have the HD3870 as pictured in my review right? Just wanted to check because there are multiple models of the Gigabyte HD3870.
i dont want to connect it to an external low volt source or use speed controller like Fan mate ?
thnx
Personally I haven't been using Cat 8.10; but that's what I've been reading.