You're playing Crysis Warhead, you see your opponent and are preparing to jump them from behind. They turn around and see you, but before you defeat them you are killed. Why? Because your 256MB strong AGP card just isn't cutting it anymore. Time for an upgrade, but where to turn? The new Radeon HD 4870 by PowerColor promises to serve up some of the best graphics with their new 512MB of GDDR5 memory graphics card, but can it hack the latest games? That is all what we will try to find out and more, as we already know the Radeon HD 4870 is a great card but maybe this PowerColor version can just go that one step further. So bring on the action games. - Techware Labs

PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Board Review

The box of the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 card is rather good looking, with the brand name, model, ATI logo and a few features on the front of the box. These are careful not to draw the attention away from the knight swinging a huge sword on the front. The back of the box displays even more features, including the capability of CrossFire and DirectX 10.1. The Radeon HD 4870 is a very attractive card and boasts a cleancut fan, which is also red ofcourse. The slot end of the card contains two DVI outputs. The card appears to have good ventiliation and is also very sturdy, though it still can run a bit on the hot side.

We can see that the Radeon HD 4870 is a dual slot card, which allows it to use the top part as an exhaust for hot air. This also allows the card to secure itself. By looking at the bottom, we can see where the heatsink attaches for the GPU. If we opted to use a GPU cooler, this is where it would affix itself, though we would lose the attractive cover. The cooler is the reference version that has been designed by ATI and PowerColor did only change the cover to show their branding. We have seen previously that this cooler is good, though there are some better alternatives available which reduce the noise levels.

Today we've run synthetic benchmarks as well as a few real world benchmarks on the Radeon HD 4870. We've seen the PowerColor card beat the Palit card, as well as get beaten by it. So many current games require a high memory clock and lots of video memory. If you want a quiet, awesome gaming graphics card for under $300, check out the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870.