The other day we looked at the smooth creations asylum and inside was the new Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black edition. This isn't your normal overclocked Radeon HD 4870, though. If you have a look at the specifications on the thing, you will quickly discover that the card is packing some mega serious clock speeds. So what we've done is pull the card out of the smooth creations rig and install it into our testbed to see how the card performs against some of our other favorites. Since this wasn't a retail sample, we won't be looking at the package today. What we will do is have a quick look around the card and then check out the clock speeds and of course the gaming performance. - TweakTown

Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Version Review

Diamond's card resembles every other Radeon HD 4870 we've already taken the time to look at. Most of the PCB is of course taken up with a giant heatsink that runs from one end of the card to the other. The only thing we can see that Diamond has done is place their logo onto the fan to let you know what brand it is. It's worth noting that on the Diamond website we have a different picture that shows a heap of skulls on the front. Looking around the card, we continue to see those standard reference features. The back of the card has two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors while across the top having two CrossFire ports.

This is where the card begins to get pretty juicy. The standard core clock on the Radeon HD 4870 is 750MHz. Diamond have given us a 50MHz bump to 800MHz. While this is getting up there, we have seen other cards offer this. The 512MB of fast GDDR5 memory, though moves from 3600MHz data rate to a whopping 4400MHz data rate which is nothing short of impressive. Diamond have managed to pull some serious speed out of the already fast Radeon HD 4870. The massive increase in memory clock speeds really manages to give us a serious boost in performance, making it compete against the GeForce GTX 280 in a lot of tests.

It doesn't come as any real surprise that the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 comes with a bigger price tag, but when looking online the difference seems to be a measly $20. And when you look at the performance boost you get, the small increase in price really does seem like nothing. While the card does manage to use a bit more power, it isn't that much extra and there would be no reason why a power supply that could handle a reference Radeon HD 4870 couldn't handle Diamond's XOC Black edition. This is one extremely fast card and the small price increase over a stock card makes it an extremely attractive option.

If you're looking for the fastest out of the box Radeon HD 4870, you can't go past this option from Diamond. This is a Radeon HD 4870 that has one purpose, run as fast as it possibly can. Diamond has done a fantastic job with this card.