AMD's Mobility Radeon HD 6970 In CrossFire On Eurocom's Panther
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Page 1:AMD Attacks On the Mobile Front
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Page 2:Eurocom’s Panther 2.0
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Page 3:AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M
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Page 4:Benchmark Settings
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Page 5:Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
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Page 6:Benchmark Results: Productivity
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Page 7:Benchmark Results: PCMark And Sandra
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Page 8:Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage
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Page 9:Benchmark Results: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
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Page 10:Benchmark Results: Crysis
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Page 11:Benchmark Results: DiRT 2
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Page 12:Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat
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Page 13:Power And Battery Life
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Page 14:Conclusion
AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M
We’re glad to see that even AMD is referring to its new mobile modules by the shorter “Radeon HD 6970M” moniker, as the original “Mobility Radeon HD 6970” naming scheme was terribly wordy. We’re even willing to overlook any similarities to the naming practices of its competitor, for the sake of brevity.
Speaking of similarities, Eurocom thought that Nvidia’s GTX 470M SLI would so closely-match the performance levels of AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M in CrossFire that it included a pair of each for today’s tests. If the performance is indeed similar, AMD will take the performance-value win with a colossal $219 price advantage.
A surprisingly-small die comes not from a shrink in die process, but the use of a less complex GPU. A closer look at the Radeon HD 6970M’s specs indicates that its “Blackcomb XT” is nothing more than an underclocked Radeon HD 6850 desktop part, indicating that it's based on the older VLIW5 architecture, and not the company's newer VLIW4 arrangement.
| Desktop vs Mobility Radeon Graphics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop Radeon HD 6970 | Desktop Radeon HD 6850 | Radeon HD 6970M | |
| Transistors | 2.64 billion | 1.7 billion | 1.7 billion |
| Engine Clock | 880 MHz | 775 MHz | 680 MHz |
| Shader (ALUs) | 1536 | 960 | 960 |
| Texture Units | 96 | 48 | 48 |
| ROP Units | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Compute Performance | 2.7 TFLOPS | 1.49 TFLOPS | 1.3 TFLOPS |
| DRAM Type | GDDR5-5500 | GDDR5-4000 | GDDR5-3600 |
| DRAM Interface | 256-bits | 256-bits | 256-bits |
| Memory Bandwidth | 176 GB/s | 128 GB/s | 115.2 GB/s |
| TDP | 250 W | 127 W | 100 W |
AMD isn’t the only one still playing the horrid name game with its notebook parts, as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 470M appears to be nothing more than an underclocked GeForce GTX 460 SE, priced around 3x higher, without the fancy heat sinks and brackets that a desktop card must include.
| Desktop vs Mobile GeForce Graphics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop GeForce GTX 470 | Desktop GeForce GTX 460 SE | GeForce GTX 470M | |
| Transistors | 3 billion | 1.95 billion | 1.95 billion |
| Engine Clock | 607 MHz | 650 MHz | 535 MHz |
| CUDA Cores | 448 | 288 | 288 |
| Texture Units | 56 | 48 | 48 |
| ROP Units | 40 | 32 | 24 |
| Compute Performance | 1.09 TFLOPS | 855 GFLOPS | 634 GFLOPS |
| DRAM Type | GDDR5-3348 | GDDR5-3400 | GDDR5-3000 |
| DRAM Interface | 320-bits | 256-bits | 192-bits |
| Memory Bandwidth | 133.9 GB/s | 108.8 GB/s | 72 GB/s |
| TDP | 215 W | 150 W | 50 W (GPU Only) |
Note that AMD lists TDP for a complete card, while Nvidia lists it for the GPU alone. We expect actual power consumption to be somewhat similar from the complete modules.
- AMD Attacks On the Mobile Front
- Eurocom’s Panther 2.0
- AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M
- Benchmark Settings
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: PCMark And Sandra
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage
- Benchmark Results: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
- Benchmark Results: Crysis
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 2
- Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat
- Power And Battery Life
- Conclusion
The overall performance is quite good especially in single mode which it's faster than both GTX 470M/480M.I think if AMD pays more attention to mobile drivers, then 2 of this cards should perform better.
About the price,well not everyone configures the laptop with i7 980x.Websites usually test the high-end specs in order to reduce the bottleneck and let the laptop run at its full potential.
I've read that Sager will soon release a model with mobile Sandy bridge CPUs along with 1 6970M and it won't be very expensive I think.
Duh of course, we all do but i mean 32 bedrooms IS kinda small. On a serious note, wtf 5k seriously? I could build a desktop and hook it up to a small generator for 1.5k and get at least 4 hours of power than pay 5k for 20min Fuk that $hit.
Seriously, how could they charge 800 dollars or some such crap for half the power of their 600 dollar cards?
it does sound like they are screwing you, at first. but you have to think about it. with a full size card, they have how much space and cooling to work with? and how much space do they have with a notebook? pluss less people buy a notbook that high powered, so they have to recupe the costs of production somehow.
So all of your that cry about the battery life, the price, the weight.... its an elite desktop replacement. It was never meant to be power efficient, lightweight nor cheap. You don't buy this kinda stuff cause u need it - you buy it cause u don't.
A bit of a written rule over the years for me is that you can build the best PC for $5000 (with all of the performance bits but ditch the teenage blinged up case) ... it still applies.
Crunch the numbers for yourself and include CF or SLI and you will see it works.
$5G in a laptop fors out the best "mobile" money can buy ... will this is about right ... unless you want a bigger SSD I guess.
Nice article crash.
On a more serious note just get a desktop!