Dont understand...hd4850 10w idle @ 68c

They make noise, too.

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nutball
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Post by nutball » Thu Jun 26, 2008 1:25 pm

Modo wrote:Sorry if I was not precise enough. I was not referring to idling, but to active use, like 3D gaming. Sadly, that probably won't be helped by new drivers, and it might prevent graphics cards' manufacturers from making parts with factory-designed fanless cooling.
Well the HR-03 can cope with a 4870 with a bit of help from a fan so I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

rpsgc
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Post by rpsgc » Fri Jun 27, 2008 2:46 am

HD 4850 with Powerplay working (fixed BIOS):
Image

http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/vie ... e/30312532

29º C :)

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Post by smilingcrow » Fri Jun 27, 2008 3:00 am

I used the Xbitlabs power data in combination with the performance data from Expreview and calculated performance per watt data; the figures are normalised against the HD 4850 which is assigned a value of 100:

HD 4850 / HD 3870 / 9800 GTX

No AA/AF - 100 / 102 / 98
AA/AF - 100 / 86 / 85

So the gain is purely when using AA/AF which isn’t surprising considering they’ve beefed up that side of the architecture. The 9800 GTX+ may match the HD 4850 in the performance per watt stakes.

Sendorm
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Post by Sendorm » Fri Jun 27, 2008 3:16 am

I wonder the power consumption of that fixed bios (powerplay working) card.

elitezoid
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Post by elitezoid » Sat Jun 28, 2008 1:30 am

After reading in this thread that some of the MSI cards have a newer bios that clocks lower while in a 2D profile I can across this review:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powe ... 50/21.html

What I found interesting is that the review data included both an MSI and Power Colour 4850…

System power consumption – Idle

MSI 124W
Powercolor 128W

System power consumption – Peak

MSI 208W
Powercolor 208W

So there is a difference of 4 watts at idle which I’m guessing is due to the fact that the MSI card was using the newer bios.

So last night I decided to take a brave pill and flash my brand new HIS 4850 with the newer bios which can be found here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/1635 ... 80605.html

I used Winflash 2.0.1 to reprogram the bios and also used GPU-Z to backup the original bios should anything go wrong:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/11 ... 0.1.2.html

Luckily it went smoothly and after a reboot GPU-Z was reporting the following while idle…

Image
Image

As you can see the newer bios 11.004 is working and I noticed a drop in idle temps of around 2C, not a huge amount but certainly better than nothing. Note I am using the official 8.6 Cat drivers and have not yet installed the hotfix.

This is what the newer 11.004 bios looks like in Radeon Bios Editor which be found here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/Utilities/RBE/

Image

Now I’ve not had any experience using this utility but it looks like it would be fairly easy to adjust the 2D profile to further reduce gpu core and memory speeds, and voltage.

What do you guys think perhaps someone with more experience would fancy giving it a go? :wink:
Last edited by elitezoid on Sat Jun 28, 2008 11:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

elitezoid
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Post by elitezoid » Sat Jun 28, 2008 3:59 am

** UPDATE ** Probably best to hold fire before flashing with a bios file modified with the latest version of RBE, could be some issues with it... http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... p?t=192759

** Edit ** a fix has been found, seems that the problem was isolated to the 4870 cards and DDR5 memory.

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/ove ... idcard/152
Last edited by elitezoid on Mon Jun 30, 2008 3:27 am, edited 2 times in total.

johnniecache7
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Post by johnniecache7 » Sat Jun 28, 2008 10:50 am

:D The Accelero S1 fits the HD 4850 heres heads up for those looking for verification. This guy at RFD deals installed one.

h*tp://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=604702

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Post by ryboto » Sun Jun 29, 2008 10:18 am

elitezoid wrote:...
Thanks for the report, do you have any way to test the idle power consumption of the system after the BIOS update?

elitezoid
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Post by elitezoid » Mon Jun 30, 2008 3:22 am

ryboto wrote:
elitezoid wrote:...
Thanks for the report, do you have any way to test the idle power consumption of the system after the BIOS update?
Unfortunately I don't have any equipment to monitor power consumption so no way of telling, although I'd also be very interested to find out!

btw seems others have done the same bios update without any problems...

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1319658

defaultluser
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Post by defaultluser » Tue Jul 01, 2008 5:17 pm

elitezoid wrote:After reading in this thread that some of the MSI cards have a newer bios that clocks lower while in a 2D profile I can across this review:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powe ... 50/21.html

What I found interesting is that the review data included both an MSI and Power Colour 4850…

System power consumption – Idle

MSI 124W
Powercolor 128W

System power consumption – Peak

MSI 208W
Powercolor 208W

So there is a difference of 4 watts at idle which I’m guessing is due to the fact that the MSI card was using the newer bios.

So last night I decided to take a brave pill and flash my brand new HIS 4850 with the newer bios which can be found here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/1635 ... 80605.html

I used Winflash 2.0.1 to reprogram the bios and also used GPU-Z to backup the original bios should anything go wrong:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/11 ... 0.1.2.html

Luckily it went smoothly and after a reboot GPU-Z was reporting the following while idle…

Image
Image

As you can see the newer bios 11.004 is working and I noticed a drop in idle temps of around 2C, not a huge amount but certainly better than nothing. Note I am using the official 8.6 Cat drivers and have not yet installed the hotfix.

This is what the newer 11.004 bios looks like in Radeon Bios Editor which be found here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/Utilities/RBE/

Image

Now I’ve not had any experience using this utility but it looks like it would be fairly easy to adjust the 2D profile to further reduce gpu core and memory speeds, and voltage.

What do you guys think perhaps someone with more experience would fancy giving it a go? :wink:
Yup, I did the same thing. I flashed my Sapphire card with the MSI BIOS, and now the card idles at 160/500 instead of 500/750. You can do this with any 4850 card except the ASUS ones.

Thread on the discussion:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1319658

So far, only one person at the hardforum has reported a problem flashing, and dozens have had success, so that's not too bad a risk. Still, you COULD BRICK THE CARD, so proceed with caution.

wanky
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Post by wanky » Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:40 am

as we see with cpus just lowering the bus speeds makes hardly any difference to power consumption its the voltage that matters. given 3800 series has much better idle efficiency i wonder if it also lowered voltage.
lowering bus speeds with no voltage decrease is pointless IMO

porkchop
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Post by porkchop » Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:37 am

my experience with my 2600pro saw a 15C drop by lowering the gpu frequency from 600 to 100mhz, and memory from 1000 to 500mhz.
this was with atitool so i'm fairly sure that the voltage wasn't dropped in the process(- no voltage options were present), and the ati 2xxx series do not support powerplay.

perhaps gpus are affected differently to cpus? and lets not forget that a drop from 500 to 160 is pretty large.

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Post by ryboto » Thu Jul 03, 2008 6:06 am

wanky wrote:as we see with cpus just lowering the bus speeds makes hardly any difference to power consumption its the voltage that matters. given 3800 series has much better idle efficiency i wonder if it also lowered voltage.
lowering bus speeds with no voltage decrease is pointless IMO
With the 3800's there is a difference in core voltage when in idle, there are actually 3 different settings depending on GPU load.

MoJo
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Post by MoJo » Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:35 am

With nVidia cards that have a fixed voltage I too have found that underclocking memory significantly saves power and reduces heat. Underclocking the core did nothing.

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Post by ntavlas » Fri Jul 04, 2008 1:23 pm

I`m thinking of getting a 4850 and undervolting the heck out of it. With those bios editors at techpowerup.com it`s possible to experiment as long as you have a second vga handy.

Matija
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Post by Matija » Sun Jul 06, 2008 9:06 am

Anyone here got the 4850 and tried cooling it passively?

I've already found some horror stories about overheating VRMs, people hacksawing original heatsinks, using fans to cool the card...

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Post by Deliriou5 » Tue Jul 15, 2008 6:07 pm

Matija wrote:Anyone here got the 4850 and tried cooling it passively?

I've already found some horror stories about overheating VRMs, people hacksawing original heatsinks, using fans to cool the card...
Just a heads up, I have the ASUS EAH4850 in a new build. I didn't like the card's fan noise or the temps, so I ordered and installed a Accelero S1 on it. I am running it passive and have idle temps at 50 C (CPU = 47C, MB = 44C for reference). I'm in a hot room right now @ 30C. Running it with a 3D load, it never gets to 60C :)

I put 6 of the 8 included mem heat sinks from the Accelero kit on the memory (the two sets of closer mem chips share one between them). The final two mem heat sinks I put on the VRMs. No issue here. Very satisfied.

-Deliriou5

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Post by npp » Wed Jul 16, 2008 9:28 am

Well, I guess we'll just have to swallow it - hardware that performs extreme (I don't hesitate using this term since the 4850 GPU is an excellent performer) and runs cool is simply a rare gift, like the 3870 was... If you want top gaming performance, you have to cope with much heat and noise. Well, one would expect things to calm down during 2D loads, but than again, if you concentrate on 2D loads, why buy such a beast... A clever technology like HybridPower or similar would be a very nice solution, but as far as I see right now these tricks simply don't work as expected.

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Post by Vicotnik » Wed Jul 16, 2008 10:04 am

npp wrote:Well, I guess we'll just have to swallow it - hardware that performs extreme (I don't hesitate using this term since the 4850 GPU is an excellent performer) and runs cool is simply a rare gift, like the 3870 was...
But it should not be like that! How hard can it be to construct a GPU capable of running in a low power mode? If 3870 could do it, then any other graphics card coming after should be able to do the same, and better than the 3870.
I know I will never buy a card that draws more than my 3870 at idle. Doesn't matter if the performance is more than double that of the 3870 - if the idle power consumption is more than say 1-2W higher than my current card, I'm not buying. That is easy for me to say though, since I seldom play games any more and never play any new titles at all, but that is not because I don't want to. I marvel at demo movies showing off new hot graphics, like the recent movie of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky with the rain and stuff. I would love to play that game, but no game experience is worth almost doubling the idle power consumption of my whole system.

HybridPower looks nice but I think it's a bit too complicated. Already the low power feature of the 3870 is too complex, requiring driver support for something that the card imho should control thorugh it's bios/fw (maybe that's impossible; I don't really know much about the inner workings of a graphics card).
My idle power consumption in Linux is 10-15W higher than in Windows, despite the fact that I'm running the closed source drivers in both OSs. If the card could manage the different power modes without driver support it would not matter what OS I use.

Sorry about the OT rant. :|

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Post by MoJo » Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:14 pm

Unfortunately it is largely impossible for the card to do it's own power management, independent of the drivers. Well, not impossible, but it would increase the cost of the card a lot.

The GPU is not a general purpose processor, and is not suitable for that kind of thing. The BIOS code is actually run by the computer's main CPU. It only does basic start-up of the card - all the more complex stuff is handled by the driver alone.

Power management could work really well if implemented properly I think. It's a shame no-one has developed a system where some of the RAM is turned off when not needed. I don't need 1GB graphics memory on the desktop....

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Post by MoJo » Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:21 pm

Unfortunately it is largely impossible for the card to do it's own power management, independent of the drivers. Well, not impossible, but it would increase the cost of the card a lot.

The GPU is not a general purpose processor, and is not suitable for that kind of thing. The BIOS code is actually run by the computer's main CPU. It only does basic start-up of the card - all the more complex stuff is handled by the driver alone.

Power management could work really well if implemented properly I think. It's a shame no-one has developed a system where some of the RAM is turned off when not needed. I don't need 1GB graphics memory on the desktop....

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Post by ryboto » Thu Jul 17, 2008 4:12 pm

Vicotnik wrote: I know I will never buy a card that draws more than my 3870 at idle.
I feel the same as you. I was talking to a friend today, and I said that I wouldn't have any problem purchasing a high end card, like one of the X2 models, so long as the idle power consumption is extremely minimal. We'll have to wait and see what the official drivers for the 4800 series actually do in regards to idle power.

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Post by Matija » Thu Jul 17, 2008 9:52 pm

I'd get the 4850 if I could use my HR-03 on it ;)

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Post by ryboto » Fri Jul 18, 2008 6:50 am

Matija wrote:I'd get the 4850 if I could use my HR-03 on it ;)
why can't you?

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Post by Matija » Fri Jul 18, 2008 7:13 am

Because the VRMs will overheat and I'll end up in a mental institution :P

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Post by ryboto » Fri Jul 18, 2008 7:15 am

Matija wrote:Because the VRMs will overheat and I'll end up in a mental institution :P
why would they overheat? just put some ramsinks on them, give it some airflow, and everyone is happy.

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Post by Matija » Fri Jul 18, 2008 8:29 am

You mean, like I did with my X1950? ;)

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Post by ryboto » Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:10 am

Matija wrote:You mean, like I did with my X1950? ;)
well, if the VRMs are anything like they are on my HD3870, the wont need much if any airflow.

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Post by aztec » Sat Jul 19, 2008 12:55 pm

OT:
@ryboto..you still have that VF-900 available?

Thanks.

Shemale
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Post by Shemale » Mon Jul 21, 2008 11:47 am

The 8.7 driver is out, and power-play is not working properly.
The temperatures are the same and the power consumption from the wall remain the same :(

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