Saphire Radeon HD 4870

Video card sets new standards-in performance and price



AMD MUST BE CAUSING some headaches in the halls of its chief competitor, Nvidia. First, AMD ships the ATI Radeon HD 4850, a $199 card that ran neck-and-neck with the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX, resulting in Nvidia significantly dropping the price of its own card. Now, AMD's $299 Radeon HD 4870 offers even greater performance, putting the card in competition with Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 260-which sells for $100 more.
Our review card came in the form of Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870. Along with the usual accessories, Sapphire bundles CyberLink's PowerDVD 7.0 and DVD Suite, a registered copy of Futuremark's 3DMark06, AMD's Ruby sampler DVD, and a 2GB USB flash drive containing a number of videos and wallpapers.
Although its HD 4850 little brother is a single-slot,single-power-connector card, the bigger HD 4870 has a thicker cooler-and-heat-sink combo that blocks an adjacent slot, and it requires a pair of six-pin PCI Express (PCIe) power connectors. Like the HD 4850, the HD 4870's RV770 GPU chip runs hot, idling at about 78 degrees Celsius. Its larger cooler vents air out the back of the case, however, so the hot GPU shouldn't have as much effect on overall system temperature. The fan is very quiet while idle but noticeably louder than the HD 4850 when it gets up to speed at high loads. It seems to cool things down quickly, however, and doesn't stay loud for long periods.
The card has a pair of dual-link DVI outputs, an analog output that support S-Video and component video, and HDMI and VGA adapters. The HDMI connector has its own integrated digital audio device, so you don't need to connect a pass-through cable to your motherboard sound card like you do with HDMI-capable Nvidia cards. The cad, which uses a fsater version of the DirectX 10.1-capable RV770 GPU introduced on the HD 4850, gets some of its increased performance from its 512MB of cutting-edge GDDR5 memory.
The card's performance is groundbreaking for its price. With 3D effects and details maxed, the Sapphire HD 4870 turned in playbale frame rates at 1,920x1,200 pixels in all our tests, clocking 35 frames per second (fps) in Call of Juarez, 36fps in World in Conflict, 39.9fps in Company of Heroes, and a whopping 100fps in F.E.A.R. This is something none of the previous-generation ATI cards could manage-not even the dual-GPU HD 3870 X2, which turned in a pokey 12fps at that resolution in World in Conflict and 26.9fps in Company of Heroes. The HD 4870 significantly outpaced Nvidia's 9800 GTX in all our tests except the two lower-resolution COmpany of Heroes; though admittedly, at its new price, the 9800 GTX now competes with the less expensive HD 4850.
The HD 4870's performance doesn't match that of Nvidia's high-end GTX 280 card, of course, but for the price of that model, you can buy two HD 4870 cards. You can drop up to three additional HD 4870 cards into a system that has a CrossFireX-compatible motherboard and additional PCIe slots, boosting performance even further.
Its bundle of useful PowerDVD applications might make Sapphire's version sound like a better pick than someting you already own, but though the company offers a two-year warranty on its video cards, all service requests must be handled through your place of purchase-not with Sapphire. (The company offers support via e-mail or a toll call.)

Given the Radeon HD 4850's already impressive performance, the $100 more you'll spend on an HD 4870 will net you about a 30 percent speed increase at higher resolutions. That additional speed might be overkill unless you're using a 24-inch or larger monitor; at lower resolutions, the HD 4870's additional performance is more of an investment in the future-something that used to be the domain of more expensive cards.-Denny Atkin
source: Computer Shopper October 2008.

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