Any news on the mountingholes? The aftermarket coolers have had tendencies not to work with the 5850s and lower since their mountingholes are closer to the connectors. The 5870s works fine with most coolers, I just wanted to know if I could resuse my old S1 on any of these? (The 5870 seemed like a stretch coolingwise so I have been waiting)

EDIT: Also, any news on the other parts that need to be cooled, particularly the vregs and such. How many have they used to distribute the power across? The cards that distribute the power among more vregs naturally have lower vreg temps.

I have an S1 cooling my 5870 just fine. Here's a link to a 6870 disassembly guide. It appears the voltage regulation has been moved to the front of the card, as opposed to the back where it traditionally lies.

Interesting, they (AMD) considers Linux a franchise.

I still have my lowly VF-900Cu on my 7600GT. I feel so inadequate

Yup, I know it can be done, however, it requires more airflow, aka more noise than a S1 put on the 5850 which would have been enough for me. It was however harder to mount it on the 5850, you had to cut some fins and I decided to wait for the next gen. Thx for the link KayDat, just what I needed

Edit: I think it was XFX that did a 4870 that had more vregs that the load was distributed amon, thus lowering their individual temperature (increased area, not total powerdissipation)

Edit2: KayDat, what fan and voltage do you use on yours?

I originally had a Scythe SS 120mm fan ziptied on and running on ~5-6V, but I recently bought a TwinTurbo Pro fan, and just taped it onto the S1. Since I was buying from the Arctic shop anyway, I also bought the VRM heatsink and RAM sinks from the Accelero Xtreme 5870. My original setup though was with a bunch of random Arctic RAM/VRM sinks and a pair of Accelero GTX280 RAM sinks, which are shorter (both in length and height) than the 5870 RAM sinks. Turns out the Xtreme 5870 RAM sink is too high for the vertical RAM (heatpipe gets in the way), so now I have the Xtreme 5870 RAM sink on the horizontal RAM, and the Xtreme GTX280 RAM sink on the vertical RAM with the Xtreme 5870 VRM sink as well.

That is actually pretty good, better than most I have heard of. Temps? Any change in core voltage or frequency?

Just a quick note : the link in the OP doesn't work

I have been looking for some non-game benchmarks but there do not seem to be any. I am thinking about things like Folding@Home and physics processing.

The lower number of stream processors suggests that the 5000 series might be faster for those tasks.

It's an XFX 5870 xXx Edition, which is factory OC'd to 875MHz core, 1300MHz mem, 1.125V core. Temps idle at ~30-40C (depending on ambient temp), and Furmark runs in the 90's, but with lots of air flow (and associated sound). Most games run fairly quiet though, since no game stresses a card like Furmark. If you have a stock 5870, you might get lower load temps with reference clocks/voltages. if you run Eyefinity or a multi monitor setup though, you might find your idle temps are higher, since power management doesn't clock down as low when more than one monitor is active.

Any temperatures on the VRM? There have been issues cooling them I have heard. I might get an old used 5870 since I might void the warranty instead of opting for a new 6xxx.

Room temperature is ~22C, here's temperatures after running Furmark for 6 minutes. It appears that throttling kicked in at around 6m30s though. As you can see, S1 can barely manage to cool a 5870 running Furmark. Notes:

• Furmark isn't representitive of real world situations. Mentioned many times, but is work mentioning again.
• Even after replacing the loose VR sinks with the Xtreme 5870 VR sink, VRM temperatures are still quite high, enough to force the card to throttle down.
• This is definately not a low noise setup, at least not at full-pelt load. Idle is alright though.

Regarding VRM temps, probably nothing short of a ThermalRight Spitfire could keep temps low enough. IIRC max temp for AMD GPU is 105C, and VRM is 120C. Someone who is obsessed with temperatures or performance may want to try for another cooler (GELID or perhaps a chunkier Arctic cooler), but I'm happy with the S1. My card sits at idle most of the time anyway, where it's very quiet, and even on load it's much quieter than stock cooling.

Yeah, I know that Furmark it is an unrealistic workload. I was just never comfortable with running it that hot right after I would have voidied the warranty on my brand new expensive card. (Even though it might have remained just below the threshold for thermal throttling during any normal load)

Let's hope the 6xxx are more suitable

Depends what brand you get I suppose. XFX (at least for the 5870) warranty supports overclocking and aftermarket coolers. You can RMA it as long as you replace the stock cooler before sending it off. Not that I intend on RMAing the card, to be honest I'm fairly comfortable with my current setup.

Could I bother you further by asking you if you could check the vrmtemps whilst running some game? Any rather new 3D game would suffice. Just want to know a realistic loadtemp
Thx

Ran Street Fighter IV in benchmark mode, with iZ3D active to put a greater load on the card. Load was between 80% to high 90's, depending on stage. If I did the benchmark without stereoscopic 3D active, load would sit around 40-50%.

Edit: BTW, fan speed doesn't hit 100% till 85C. At 73C, the TTPro fan is still running at minimum speed. I've attached the fan speed temperature curve for reference. For anyone interested, for some reason any fan speed lower than 7% causes the TTPro fan goes faster, so minimum speed is 7%. Also, we're getting a bit OT here, maybe we should wrap up any discussions regarding the 5870. If you have any more questions, post a new thread, and let me know.

Thanks! Really appreciated. Settles it for me

Although now I don't know if I should get a 5870 or 6xxx. The mouningholes are further from the displayconnectors in the 6870 compared to 5870 so the S1 should fit fine. Either one will probably do fine.

Thx again

At this point, I'd buy on price. Which one can you get cheaper? While the 6870 is indeed slower than a 5870, it gets pretty damn close, and it has extras like HDMI 1.4, a new tessellation unit etc. Quoting the WSGF review:

The 5870 costs about 50% more than the 6870 in Sweden so I am pretty set. Just waiting to see whether any shops will have to clear old stocks of 5870 by selling them for less than the retail price of the new 6870s, not very likely but still.

Also, the XFX aftermarket warrany is only valid in North America

Edit: The figures you mentioned are the same here

Edit 2: The mountingholes are closer to the connectors on the 6850 than on the 6870. This was the same with the 5850 and 5870 where the S1 had to have its fins cut in order to fit the 5850. Here are some images for the ones interested. You can seeit yourself if you compare the location of the holes with the pcie slot.
6850



6870

Hm, interesting. Only the 6870's power delivery has been moved. I didn't know the 6850 VRMs are still at the back of the card. And bad news; looks like the chip has been moved even further forward towards the connectors, compared to the 5850. If you compare to the 5850:

The bottom right mounting hole is just above the far right PCIe notch for the 5850, whereas the 6850 mounting hole is to the left of the notch.
5870:

5870 bottom right mounting hole is right before the empty space in the L-shaped PCIe slot hook, while the 6870 sits directly above the empty space.

So, distance from the display connectors, 6850, 5850, 5870 and with 6870 the furthest.

My conclusion exactly. And since the fins on the S1 has to be cut/bent to fit the 5850 but not the 5870, we can conlude that the 6850 will require the fins to be bent further than the 5850 and the 6870 should be just as fine as the 5870.

Now the only questions remaining are if the other parts than the core (vrm, vreg) will be hard to cool and whether the holes themselves are spaced apart in the same way as the older ones (seems to be the case from what I have read)

EDIT: There are apparently non-reference 6850s that might work, here is one from XFX:

Hm, looks like XFX is sharing the PCB between the 6870/6850, maybe? Power delivery is on the left, just like the 6870, and it's missing things here and there (such as a second PCIe power connector). I'm surprised the VRM's are cooled by such a puny heatsink, maybe the VRM's run cooler on the 6-series?

Sapphires 6850 seems to have clearance as well:


EDIT: I have begun a list of 68X0 that have their mountingholes further from the connectors.
All 6870
XFX non-reference 6850
Sapphire non-reference 6850
HIS non-reference 6850

FYI -- The distinct impression I got from talking with AMD reps is that most of the HD6850 cards with stock reference cooling solutions handed out as review samples were made specifically for this purpose, and very few AMD partners will be using the reference cooler, right from the start. In other words, pay close attention to specific HD6850 models from different video card makers, as there should be differences apparent right away.

That is what I am doing, listing the ones that seem to support the S1 (and because of this, other similar coolers)

All 6870
XFX non-reference 6850
Sapphire non-reference 6850
HIS non-reference 6850
ASUS non-reference 6850
Gigabyte non-reference 6850

EDIT: Conclusion: As long as it is a non-ref card, the tendency is to move the vregs from outer to inner end of card and thus moving the mounting holes further. Mike got it right

I suspect companies that have non-reference board for the 6850 are simply going to share the PCB between 6870/6850. I mean, why not? Cut down costs. A plus for us as well, as it means better compatibility.

So far, the ones that have had the standard cooler has had the standard mountingholes that are incompatible with a lot of coolers. They can't really use the standard cooler with the pcb when they moved stuff around. As long as AMD doesn't release a new reference cooler for the non-ref 6850 or they manage to fit the refeerence 6870 cooler on the non-ref 6850, the assumption holds true.