NVidia 210 VS ATI Radeon 4350

It’s the battle of the wimpy kids. Actually I already had an ATI 4350 laying around and I bought an Nvidia 210 to use in my Office PC because the board I had planned to use was built on an Nvidia chipset and I don’t care to mix Nvidia and ATI.
In the end I didn’t end up keeping the board and went back to the ATI card so now I have a useless 210 card kicking around, well I did get to pit them up against each other which is something I’m sure you wont find anywhere else since they are low budget, nobody cares, video cards.
So first I started out with the ATI Radeon 4350 card from ASUS using the latest ATI Catalyst drivers and built in Overclocking functions. I maxed out the core rather quickly while the memory kept giving more and more. I was surprised at how high I could take the memory settings before getting any artifacts or experiencing any major heat issues.
(Numbers to be updated)
Next was the Nvidia 210 card from MSI using the latest Nvidia drivers and built in Overclocking functions. I started with a nice bump on the core and went for a huge jump on the memory but was quickly halted when the PC locked up, I kept scaling back but couldn’t stop the PC from locking up so instead I worked from the bottom up and was only able to achieve a small memory overclock. While I couldn’t get much out of the memory at all I was actually able to really crank the core speed but this didn’t prove very useful in the benchmarks. Another thing I noticed is that the built in Nvidia Overclocking tools didn’t allow too much headroom for Overclocking (not like the card was capable).
(Numbers to be updated)
Towards the end of my Nvidia testing I checked the temp on the Nvidia card and thought I would run the tests again with fans directly on the cards since they were both passively cooled, Before I could even get a solid reading the board smoked at the PCI-E slot while the Nvidia card was still Overclocking and I lost the board + video card. Luckily the card was still under Newegg warranty so I sent it back but by the time I got the new one and decided I didn’t want it anyway it was too late and I was stuck with the new one.

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AMD Radeon HD 7970

Present a short preview of the features of the Radeon HD 7970, the only one in which can reveal details in advance of the moves with which AMD will change its offer to the market in early 2012.

At the close of 2010, with the launch of the Northern Islands and the family of Radeon HD 6900, AMD introduced a first ex-design with the past with Southern Islands the distance is even more pronounced because of the big model of the architecture of the heart. After a year of stagnation for the entire field of 3D graphics, especially in the niche of products dedicated to high-end gamers and more advanced users and enthusiasts, the news that AMD has in place are really a lot.

Start from the production process with the jump from 40 to 28 nanometers that has allowed to cram into the silicon of the Radeon HD 7970 Tahiti well 4.312 billion transistors. This production technology allows the graphics processor to operate at a frequency of 925 MHz while still leaving considerable room for growth, margin will be just that the playing field on which the partners of AMD will be able to indulge themselves with the factory overclocking, so as to offer the avid gamer products higher performance than standard.In terms of memory, suggest the introduction of the controller with a 384-bit wide bus (six-channel 64-bit) supports five GDDR5 memory operating frequency of 5.5 GHz equivalent to a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 264 Gbytes / s.

Full of new architecture
With Southern Islands AMD introduces a new generation of architecture identified as self-explanatory as the Graphics Core Next present the overall scheme referring to the reading test in the next issue of PC Professional for an analysis in detail. The core architecture has 32 ​​drive bays, each of which integrates 64 stream processors for a total of 2,048. Right here w find one of the most interesting because the designers have abandoned the approach AMD Vliw5 and Vliw4, used respectively for the Radeon HD 6800 series to 6900 and for those in favor of something more flexible and less structured. A Compute Unit is organized into 4 units inside SIMD ( Single Instruction Multiple Data ), each of which contains 16 stream processors, in turn, operated by a single programmable scheduler. Alongside the SIMD units are 4 texture units and a structure of registers and cache completely redesigned for high performance not only with typical workloads of video game graphics engines, but also with multimedia applications, computing, productivity and scientific.

Performance, but always under control consumption
Among the many new features stand out the new control technologies and energy efficiency related to the placing of double-flow performance, a product of this caliber, is the first goal in the ladder of priorities. Hence that behind names such as AMD and Powertune ZeroCore lie Power monitoring and control of power supply voltages, currents, consumption, frequency and temperature without interruption while the GPU is active. The operating frequency is handled with extreme granularity so as to offer maximum performance within the parameters of maximum consumption. When the control system detects a situation of static image rather than being idle at preparation of the system here is the emerging energy-saving solutions: from 24 watts down to less than 3 watts thanks to the effective shutdown of the GPU, the maintenance of the circuit only refresh the memory controller and PCI Express. All this not only when you have one card in the PC, but also in the case of Crossfire configurations.

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