You keep asking me to run tests that i keep telling you - over and over - i have already run. i don't need to repeat what you are asking to do over again. It is done. The results are in. Both overclocks are 100% stable. The Radeon scales like Radeons do.
You'd be defensive if you kept being questioned over and over again about the same damn thing and no one bothered to pay the slightest attention to your answer.
Or it could JUST could be - as *shocking* as it appears to be to some of you ...
. . . GTX 480 just scales better than HD 5870
So, you did test the VRM temps and they weren't hotter in the instances where 5870 scaled poorly? I just did a quick one over of the thread, and unless I'm mistaken you never mentioned that you did. And even if you did, just saying so one more time can't be more troubling to you more than the long winded rant can it? Have some class, man.
And as far as stability goes, let me repeat myself one (hopefully) last time. I have no doubts that the card is 100% stable, however, if the VRMs *are* overheating and the chip *is* being throttled that wouldn't necessarily manifest itself as instability, although it would reduce performance.
As far as GTX 480 scaling better than HD 5870, again, I have no problem with that. Most of your 5870 OC results looks like the GPU is being severely bottlenecked by something else, like the CPU, or PCIe bandwidth, while the Fermi results don't. Fermi scaling better than Cypress is fine. Fermi scaling extraordinarily while Cypress' gains are simply minuscule simply looks fishy, especially when I have another example exhibiting pretty decent scaling.
Yes. i demonstrated it. HD 5870 is finally at the end of its architectural life. It has a speed bump left perhaps in a 5890 but it will eventually become unbalanced if they push it much further.
Except it doesn't -- or at least shouldn't -- work that way. Sure, as you increase the clock speed of one part the rest of the system becomes more and more of a bottleneck, everyone knows that, but you shouldn't see a giant nosedive after a specific frequency like we're seeing with your results vs. other people's unless something *very wrong* is happening. I mean, you have faster parts (5970 and GTX 480) that aren't yet causing the rest of the system to become a bottleneck, so it's obviously not that. Whether it is a flaw in your testing (either in the equipment or methodology), a driver bug, or just a very strange architectural quirk, I don't know, just that it is not normal behavior for a processor to be exhibiting. I'd like to find out, by first cancelling out the (no offense) seemingly most likely scenario, but you don't seem to be making that easy....