ATI 5870M CF > 480M. Cheaper Too.

Eurocom Test

Well, Eurocom has tested their new Leopard 18.4" notebook in two different configurations: ATI 5870M in CrossFire vs an Nvidia 480M. Guess which configuration is cheaper.

To boot, Eurocom claims it's easier to cool (2) 5870's compared to a single 480M.

 

Not surprising that the Crossfire won, though I would have thought the Crossfire would have done far better on 3DMark06 compared to the GTX 480M. Also, the test uses TDP as a measure of power consumption, which is a terrible determinant, when they easily have access to batteries and can measure power draw on idle and load. If this is the full review, then no game testing is a big fail...

 

Yeah. I'd love to see a test with a Kill-A-Watt or something inline measuring the current.

 

I'm looking for a better review from Eurocom's site, will link it if I come across it. But yes, 17% advantage is kinda bleh. I think I'd almost be more willing to stick with a single GPU and avoid the dual GPU complexity.

 

17% advantage with crossfire but then again you can't really trust dual GPUs to run perfectly on your games. Artifacts tend to happen just because the games doesn't support dual GPUs until later patches usually ._.

 

Ehh... I've got dual 4670's in my desktop, and they've seemed to perform great in all my games. Haven't noticed any weirdness. But I haven't had that machine on for a few months now because we're remodeling.

 

I used to get some artifacts on Dawn of War 2's main screen with dual GPU enabled Also happened for Company of Heroes. They work just fine on single GPU though ._.

The problem's fixed now though But I still don't exactly trust multi-GPU for now. I'd rather go for a single strong GPU

 

It's Eurocom, guys. False Alarm....

 

I cant believe Fudzilla posted such an article on such a flimsy measurement.

That said, if you're going with an X8100, it would be silly to choose the 480M over the CF 5870. Don't buy something that monstrous with a single, more expensive GPU.

 

Again 300W "can" run a desktop chipset, a desktop I7 CPU and 2 480M's.

While it's fishy to use TDP's as power consumption, it's even more fishy to not even have given the performance of a single 5870 to compare with on the same machine. Oh well. There will be more 480M sli machines in the future I suspect. And cutting them to 1-1.5Gb of memory will help both the TDP and the power consumption.

Not putting much stock in the Eurocom tests...

 

Sighface TT...

When are we going to kill 3dmark06 already? Although 5870x2 being better is hardly surprising for anyone in the know, would've much preferred some Vantage GPU score comparison.

 

I don't understand the point of comparing two cards. they are both great and one is better than the other by what a few frame rate in terms of gaming? I don't know that much about graphics but this is my opinion.

 

this has to be the worst article from fudzilla ever.. seriously , the comparison is so flawed but idk as long as ATI tops..

 

It's a blog, get over it guys. Of course they're going to be grabbing for anything that ''looks'' interesting. They aren't held to the same level of credibility as mainstream medians -- bloggers aren't considered journalists.

 

Regardless of how poor the reporting was and how uninformative the Eurocom tests were, I don't think anything was too surprising. No one doubts that 2 5870's can best a single 480M, and we all know the Nvidia card is expensive. I'm more disappointed we didn't get a good, detailed set of tests and measurements we can dig through. It hasn't exactly been easy to compare these 2 cards; we've all figured out that whichever GPU gets matched with an i7 980x desktop CPU will smoke the other one stuck running an i720QM.

 

I'm sure most of you are aware of this chart
Notebookcheck: Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List

 

Yes, we are very aware.

 

Yes. This. I wonder why is Eurocom so popular with tech websites and the like? You rarely see features involving Sager or something else.

 

Because Eurocom can be very sensationalist and that makes for good blog writing

 

I've got an x8100 with crossfire 5870s coming in what should be the next week.
Providing nothing goes wrong I'll be providing benchmarks so you can guage performance yourself from the setup, which will hopefully be a bit more indicative of real world performance than 3dmark06! (Simply compare against any 480m results) If any of you saw my Alienware 4850m crossfire M17 thread, you should know what to expect

 

The pricing issue could also be impacted by supply and demand right now as well. Keep that in mind. Given the long lead times of 48xM equipped devices, it's probable that the supply is thin and thus it goes to the highest bidders, which drives up price.

Not saying Nvidia doesn't need to get back down to planet earth in regards to pricing (compared to performance and compared to competition), but I think there might be some contributing factors is all.

Alex, if you give some performance figures of 5870 single GPU for folks to compare to the 480M, we can already extrapolate the CF vs SLI differences. I think most folks were thinking that comparing CF to a single GPU, while interesting for those wondering what they might have to give up to go with a single GPU solution, was more of a "what CF is faster than a single GPU? No kidding!" kind of thing. The testing simply confirmed the obvious without giving a like to like measurement. It was done as a power consumption level comparison, but even that wasn't equal between the two.

But I have liked your testing very much in the past, so please do more as we eat up data and figures around here like we were starving

 

Haha, yeah without the cash to drop on a X7200 to swap in and out both sets of cards on the same mobo/cpu, its quite hard to get a direct comparison.

Still, my x8100 benchmarks will definately be coming, I'm pretty sure I still have the same set of benchmark software I used for the 4850m suite, on one of my external drives, and Im quite happy to get hold of any additional free benchmarks people want done.
For single card comparison, then some of the single card Clevo models would probably provide a better direct comparison, although I might look to do a small number, dependant on time available.