Temperature, Noise, Overclockability

The power circuit of the Revolution 700 Deluxe is identical to that of the reference Radeon HD 4870 X2. Thus, both cards should have the same power consumption and we only checked out the Palit card’s noise, temperature and overclockability.

The numbers seem to indicate that the idea of creating a quiet Radeon HD 4870 X2 has failed even though the Revolution 700 Deluxe is better than the reference card from ATI, but there is one important nuance. For an unclear reason our testbed’s power supply would increase the speed of its fans during our tests of the Revolution 700 Deluxe. Since we could only measure the noise of the whole system, the numbers are big although the card itself is very quiet. This is quite a surprise considering the identical power circuits of both cards, but it is a fact nonetheless: our power supply (Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX1000EWL) behaves differently with the Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe than with the reference card from ATI.

Judging by the data reported by Catalyst Control Center, Palit’s cooler copes well with its job:

The GPU temperature is never higher than 75°C under load, which is an excellent result for a Radeon HD 4870 X2. For comparison, the GPU temperature of the reference card can be as high as 90°C. So, while the Revolution 700 Deluxe’s cooler is not blameless in terms of noisiness, its cooling performance is all right (but don’t forget that the hot air does not leave the system case with this card).

We were not successful in our overclocking attempts. Even when we increased the core frequencies by 5-10MHz above the default, the card would fail and reboot the driver after working in 3D mode for a while. Therefore we benchmarked our Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe at its default frequencies, i.e. 790MHz GPU and 950 (3800) MHz memory.