RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 76

SWEETENING THE LEMONADE
A Look at how AMD Conquers Sour Times
By Chris Angelini

WHEN STUCK WITH LEMONS, MAKE lemonade, right? Lemons are easy to come by in this business. There always seem to be a few lying around—price hikes, tight allocation, buggy drivers, poor yields—and the list goes on and on and on. In bad months, there might be a bucket of them. In 2007, AMD grew an orchard. You might call it a perfect storm of lemons. There’s no point in recounting all the whats and whys here. Now is the time to start asking constructive questions. First on the list might be: “Does it make sense to only sell NVIDIA?” Of course not. NVIDIA makes great products, and, here at the top of 2008, it leads the performance pack on a single GPU basis. But that doesn’t mean NVIDIA holds all of the cards. Quite the contrary, and this leads to the second question: “In evaluating graphics cards, where can I fi nd superior value propositions?” Obviously, there are many ways to measure value, and a lot of it has to do with subjective factors. If you’ve followed RAM, RAM TV (see www.reselleradvocate.com/ public/ram/rampage/rampageTV_hd2000. html), or other industry sources over the last year, you know that the Radeon HD 2000 line of GPUs wasn’t a pure performance play. Instead, AMD launched its fi rst line of ATI GPUs with the “more bang for the buck” message. In English, that meant finding the

More Of the good stuff
Most of the RV670’s innards match those of the R600. You’ll fi nd the same 320 stream processors, 16 texture units, and 16 ROPs. The ring bus memory controller steps down from 1Mb to 512-bit, and the memory interface was similarly halved. However, the number and speed of memory channels were increased with the RV670, and internal clock speeds are higher. All in all, performance between the two is comparable, only now the RV670 runs cooler, consumes less power, has more features (including DirectX 10.1 support), and keeps plenty of headroom sidelined for future updates. Also signifi cant is the fact that RV670 supports CrossFireX, AMD’s multi-GPU teaming technology. With old-school CrossFire, users were limited to teaming two GPUs, putting both to work improving 3D performance in a single application. CrossFireX now raises the bar for teaming across up to four GPUs.

DOUBLE DOWN
This all said, AMD/ATI faced a problem. For years, the company has played leapfrog with NVIDIA for the performance crown in graphics, but while RV670 scored high, the lemons underfoot kept AMD from jumping to that top spot. So how to make lemonade? NVIDIA set some precedent with its GeForce 7950 GX2, bolting two 7900 cards together in an SLI confi guration on a single edge connector. AMD took this idea one step further. The new Radeon HD 3870 X2 takes two 3870 GPUs and plants them on a single PCB. The X2 card has some subtle differences from the standard issue 3870 card. While the base level 3870 features a 775 MHz core clock, the GPUs in the X2 notch up to 825 MHz. (Perhaps this is why AMD gives the graphics chips the slightly different codename of RV680.) Each GPU uses a 256-bit pipeline to 512MB of GDDR3 memory, making 1GB of total RAM on the card. Interestingly, AMD opts here for 900 MHz GDDR3, a slight slip from the 1125 MHz GDDR4 in the regular 3870. Again, this would seem to leave the door open to future premium SKUs using higher clock settings. For the curious, AMD ties these two GPUs together with a special PCI Express 1.1 switch chip, the Expresslane PEX 8547 from PLX Technology. Of course, the punchline with the X2 is that it lives in a state of CrossFire. In fact, near as anyone can tell so far, you can’t actually take the card out of CrossFire mode. AMD doesn’t go out of its way to shout about the fact, perhaps because it sounds cooler to have a “single card” that can stomp the competition or perhaps because some people might get a bit nervous about not being able to turn off a mode that has historically offered compatibility issues with certain software titles. (This is true of multi- GPU solutions in general, not only Cross- Fire.)

However, one of AMD’s few lemon-free areas in 2007 was ATI’s Catalyst driver set. The software has remained very stable, incorporated ever new image quality enhancements, and kept abreast of the latest popular 3D apps. While we’re still waiting for the CrossFire X drivers to materialize that would enable three- or four-way teaming, AMD came up with an enhancement that users have been craving for years.

With both CrossFire and SLI, whenever teaming mode was enabled, the accelerated application was run at full-screen while any other connected screens were disabled. The reason for this revolved around load balancing. In most dual-GPU scenarios, the two processors would evenly share the load, with each often crunching every other frame or respective halves of every frame.

The amount of load for each GPU is easy to compute when running on one monitor at full screen. But once you window the application and need to reserve processing bandwidth for other windows or the Desktop, then things get much more complicated. Resolving how to accelerate more than one application has remained a major stumbling block for every graphics vendor.

As of the HD 3870’s release, Catalyst drivers now enable the accelerated application to run in a window without blacking out other displays. In fact, the accelerated window can span two monitors, even when running at high resolutions such as 2560 x 1600. This leaves us curious about statements like this one from Sapphire: “3D applications such as games use both on-board GPUs together in CrossFire mode to deliver a single accelerated output on the Primary display only.” Hmm.

We’ve seen the X2 accelerate a spanned window, so there’s clearly more to the story. Admittedly, we haven’t done the benchmarking to gauge if an application performs better at full-screen on a single monitor than under the new multimonitor setup. The gamer sites can hash that one out. In our book, the convenience of having a full desktop and viewing of nonaccelerated windows beats out tunnel vision of a single application any day, even if it means losing a few frames per second.

How exactly does the X2 lemonade stack up? You might assume that the card would offer immediate power savings versus running two 3870 cards in CrossFire. The truth is counterintuitive. The X2 draws marginally more power, largely because of the 10W to 12W drawn by that switch chip. Under load and with current drivers, the HD 3870 X2 draws more power than any other single- GPU card on the market. The good news is that it’s also faster than any other single- GPU card on the market. Moreover, thanks to AMD’s many tweaks with its PowerPlay technology, the 3870—and by extension the X2—consume far less power at idle than the competition. Some reports show a single X2 card chewing through almost 25% less power at idle than two GeForce 8800 GT SLI cards.

For those who think price and performance remain the bottom line, we won’t sugar coat it. A pair of 8800 GT 512 cards in SLI will run about $600 and will generally outperform the 3870 X2. Of course, this depends on the test and/or application. Thereare some instances when the X2 will beat a pair of 8800 GT 512 cards, although these tend to be on synthetic benchmarks. On the other hand, the X2 costs about $450, which is a 25% discount off the NVIDIA price tag. Plus you get the new Catalyst multi-monitor benefi ts. With the next major Catalyst update, we should see the ability to team a pair of X2 cards and get quad-GPU acceleration.

KEEP IT COOL
Kudos to AMD for being clever enough to turn what was commonly perceived as a disadvantaged GPU situation into something that could sweep the single-card benchmarks. But we all know that AMD doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The company’s add-in board (AIB) partners add plenty of their own value, even in situations when forced to make lemonade.

Sapphire is without question the first among AMD’s partners, and over the years Sapphire has manufactured most of ATI’s self-branded boards. No one knows better than Sapphire about ATI’s idiosyncrasies and how to make the best of them. In the battle of performance vs. thermals and noise, ATI has usually elected to emphasize performance. This remains true with the HD 3870, which is one of the hotter chips in its price band. Most enthusiasts will forgive this because few hover over their power bills or can hear an extra 5 dB of fan noise over the sound of their booming 5.1 speakers.

Some people do care, though. For these folks, most of whom will pay more for a greener, quieter solution, Sapphire has come out with a long string of value-add coolers. We’ve seen passive, noiseless heatpipe rigs from Sapphire for years. The Ultimate X1950 PRO featured a bowl-shaped copper fi n active heatsink a la Zalman’s famous line of coolers. This was a large but much quieter approach to fan-based cooling. In that same generation, Sapphire came out with its TOXIC brand of water-cooled GPUs. This involved putting a thin-profi le water pump on a second card that occupied a second slot, not only dropping noise output but also providing an easy upgrade solution for water coolers that didn’t necessitate a full watercooling implant at the chassis level.

Water doesn’t always have to be the highend answer. In 2005, Sapphire was poised to come out with a radical and highly effi - cient liquid metal cooling system until the manufacturer behind the liquid metal system pulled the plug. Now, however, we may have something even better. The ATOMIC brand from Sapphire includes a new heatsink approach it calls Vapor-X. In a nutshell, the process works with fi ve layers in a thin profi le that still fi ts within a single-slot design. Next to the GPU surface, there’s the lower cover, or the outer shell of the cooler. Then come the transportation wick, vaporization wick, condensation wick, and fi nally the upper/outer cover.

Essentially, there’s a vacuum chamber in the center of this box that enables hot moisture to vaporize quickly from the transportation wick and condense in the upper, cooler portion of the box, releasing heat throughout the process. It’s a simple, safe concept, but Sapphire is the fi rst to apply it in the world of graphics. The upshot is that buyers get an effi cient, practically silent cooling solution that will provide plenty of overclocking headroom. And yes, the ATOMIC cards can be run in a CrossFire configuration.

MMM, TASTY
Momentum can be a great thing, but it also has a downside. In the lemon year of 2007, AMD lost a lot of momentum; there’s no point in saying otherwise. But as we’ve seen over and over, there’s rarely such a thing as a winner or loser in this business. Simply because AMD didn’t score the single fastest GPU of the year doesn’t mean that the second- fastest couldn’t morph into something that ultimately was the coolest or most value- added fi t for a given customer. Call it the best lemonade in town. Don’t overlook the great opportunities still fl owing out of AMD simply because it’s trying to rebuild momentum. Customers want these products, but because AMD’s visibility is a bit lower now, your buyers may not be aware of their cravings yet. Show them.