Radeon HD4870 review - Card, Testing setup
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 09 Sep 2008

The 4870 resembles the 3870 with its dual slot cooler, red PCB and various other features. The card is equipped with 512 MB of GDDR5 memory, offering a whooping 3600 MHz effective memory clock while operating at 900 MHz. This compensates for the lack of the 512 bit bus, and ATI comes close to NVIDIA’s GT200 family who still use GDDR3 but with the wider bus (512 and 448 for the GTX 280 and GTX 260 respectively).

One of the most annoying ‘features’ of the 4850 is the noise of the single slot cooler, which just barely copes with almost a billion transistors heating it up. In 4870, despite the higher clocks, the dual slot cooler does its job impeccably and not once did we even think about the noise the card makes.
Unlike the 3870, the 4870 has to use two PCI-E power connectors, both 6 pin in this case. The increased die size of course requires more power to feed the 2.5 times more shader processors.

Since we didn’t do Crossfire testing, we decided to skip the X48 motherboard and just use NVIDA’s 790i SLI chipset in form of ASUS’s Striker Extreme II.
- Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9650
- ASUS Striker Extreme II
- OCZ PC3-1600 7-6-6 2x1 GB
- PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR
- Western Digital RaptorX 150 GB