Today we are taking a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 video card, which is based on the ATI reference design, using the stock dual slot cooling design, to keep the temperatures down. As we have seen in the last two Radeon HD 4870 articles, the Radeon HD 4800 series cards are plagued with heat issues, which is mostly due to the fans not running at higher speeds as the temperatures rise. This issue is in no way the fault of the card manufacturers, but some have taken steps to allow users to manually control the fan speeds using software developed by the manufacturer. We're curious if Sapphire has looked into the issue to keep their card from heating up enough to cook eggs on it. - Overclockers Club

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Version Review

The packaging from Sapphire has always been both pleasing to look at and informative. On the cover they have the slogan prepare to dominate which gets us all excited and ready to game on this baby. They also include some of the features, as well as stickers showing some of the goodies that they bundled with the Radeon HD 4870, which we will take a look at later on. The back of the box shows some more of the specifications, as well as highlights from the video card. One thing more and more manufacturers are putting on the box as well are the system requirements which is very helpful for making your choice.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 card uses the ATI reference dual slot cooler. On the top of the cooler there is a logo sticker showing one of Sapphire's mascots, with the model of the card imprinted on it. On the back of the card you will notice the bracket that is under the GPU, so that the stress of the heatsink is balanced evenly across the board. This board is a PCI Express 2.0 based architecture, which provides double the bandwidth of the legacy PCI Express design. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 is backwards compatible with the older PCI Express architecture, but it will run at the lower speeds of that bus.

Sapphire chose to use a copper heatsink with copper heatpipes attached to aluminum fins enclosed in a plastic shroud, to funnel air through to cool the GPU core. A large blower style fan forces the air through the shroud and out the back of the case. At the heart of the card is the RV770 GPU, which is clocked at 750MHz and is manufactured using a 55nm process. Surrounding the core is the 512MB of GDDR5 memory with an effective bandwidth of 3600MHz, operating on a 256-bit memory but. There are 800 stream processing units and 40 texture units on the Radeon HD 4870 graphics card.

This video card was the best overclockable card we have checked out of the three Radeon HD 4870 cards we have seen so far. The limits allowable in the Catalyst control center are 790MHz on the core and 4400MHz on the memory. We wer almost able to max them out with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 reaching 785MHz on the GPU and 4380MHz on the memory. That is a very fast memory speed. Anything higher and the screen would artifact or we would get a blue screen, so our final overclock settings was 785/4380MHz which is a more than excellent results when taking the default clock settings into account.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 performed exactly where the other Radeon HD 4870 cards have been and that is right on top of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 series cards. We cannot stress enough the great performance that is being achieved by the Radeon HD 4870 cards for the price that it is to purchase them. Sapphire sweetens the deal with all of the goodies and extras that they include, such as the 2GB thumb drive and full versions of popular software which to us always makes us feel like we are getting a better deal. For the price, you could not get a better deal.