Some new hardware since I last reported in. :)

I have recently had the privilege of getting a cherry Xeon W3570 and one of the hottest GPU’s on the market, the HD5970 dual gpu solution from ATI/Radeon. This one happened to be the Sapphire Radeon overclocked edition. Even though it is not advertised as an overclocked card, it has higher core and memory clocks than any other manufacturer, as of now…

The XEON W3570

First off the Xeon 3570 is an amazing chip. Period. On phase it overclocked to 5225 MHz on only 1.44 Vcore and 1.30 vtt for a very respectful PiFast run of 16.17sec. I might add that I was running a 2:10 divider on the ram and a 20x uncore. I won’t bore you with ram timings and such. All of that is visible in the screenies below. I also managed a nice Super-Pi run of 7.75sec at the same speed of 5225 MHz..

Unfortunately for the WPrime runs of 32m and 1024m I had to drop back my clocks a bit due to the fact that my phase couldn’t keep it cold enough. Even at only 1.43Vcore. But it still produced some respectable numbers. Prime32 was actually not that bad and my temps stayed low enough to make a 4.731 run at 5091mhz. Prime1024 was a bit harder and hotter so I had to drop the CPU back to 4946 MHz but it still made respectable run of 153.984 or 3min 33secs. If I had ln2 for this wonderful w3570 I am positive I would have a world record competitor.

The Radeon 5970

Out of the box….this thing is freaking huge. Its length dwarfs my EVGA Classified by about a 1 3/4″. You are definitely not putting this card into a mid-sized case. If you manage to, you will kill it and everything in your pc with heat. Capable of running 1.3vgpu and a 1gig core you can heat a small room with it. No kidding!!

Some benchmark tests

First off, the driver for this card is at best, poor. When they work they work great. But for an overclocker they are a nightmare. Constant crashing and the need to reboot, uninstall and reinstall drivers becomes the norm after about an hour with this card. Is it worth it? IMO if you’re an overclocker and into the HWbot anything is worth the huge points this card has to offer. I was totally blown away when I was running a 1gig gpu core clock in Vantage at 1.3Vgpu. Interestingly enough I couldn’t get the 1 gig clock to run in 03, 05, and 06 without a huge meltdown of the drivers. But the high 977 MHz clock for 3Dmark 03 and 06 turned in some nice scores. While I only managed a 920 core clock for 3Dmark 05 my score was very respectable. All in all… it was a great time benching these cards. It’s not often that we see an increase in performance hardware that makes us “hardware junkies” excited. I can say that this was one of those rare times.