These pre-overclocked Radeon HD 4870's are much like London buses, you don't get any for a while and then a few pop along at once. Leading the charge was the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870, packing in an 1GB frame buffer and ZEROtherm cooler. Sapphire then stepped up to the plate with its Toxic card. Now we have Force3D enter the fray with yet another pre-overclocked card featuring a different heatsink. In fact Force3D has created their own design to go up against the big boys and also take some of the money and market on that area. Say hi, to the Black edition. Arriving at just under $300 with a healthy boost in frequencies, let's see if this is the graphics card to own and delivering just that little extra. - Hexus

Force3D Radeon HD 4870 Black Edition Board Review

Dispatching the reference cooler in order to gain higher frequencies and lower temperatures, Force3D opts to go with an Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo cooler that currently etails for around $55 on its own. The cooler uses a couple of 80mm fans that are controlled by the board, and they can spin at variable speed depending upon temperature. We found it reasonably quiet under load, beating out the reference heatsink in the aural stakes. Cooling is further enhanced by having four heatpipes split over the large area which effectively takes over the card and temperatures lower than a standard Radeon HD 4870.

Looking rather impressive on top of the card, the Accelero does take up a little extra room than the usual twin slot taking reference heatsink. The fans protrude upwards and force the design to become a three slot affair. Unfortunately, though, the impressive cooling is directed solely towards to the GPU, the 512MB memory chips are left bare. Force3D ramps up the core clock to 770MHz and also increases the memory clock to an effective 3800MHz. We reckon that the Black edition's core and memory could have been set higher, matching the 780/4000MHz from Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 Toxic version.

We find a basic bundle, but one that contains everything you need to make the most of the Radeon HD 4870's connectivity options. We'd have hoped to see at least one 6-pin PCI Express adapter though. The bundle is the same as the reference card's, meaning that the extra budget has been allotted to the board alone. No included game ensures that it's almost as reference as reference can be, keeping etail costs below $300. The package has a standard 2 year warranty that begins on the date of purchase, but the warranty is not transferrable which isn't really that nice but we guess it is already a decent warranty as such.

Cranking it up some more from the base 770/3800MHz clocks, we managed to gain 30MHz on the core, and raising it to 800MHz. The memory, running at an effective 3800MHz, rose to an incredible 4400MHz, the highest we have seen. Force3D has gone about launching a special edition Radeon HD 4870 in a well thought out manner. The company has tied up with Arctic Cooling and used a Accelero Twin Turbo heatsink to cool the hot running Radeon HD 4870 GPU residing underneath. However, such is the design that it doesn't concurrent cool the memory chips as well, which is a pitty and could have easily been done.

Appreciating the performance and aural benefits of using a heatsink that's comfortably better than the dual slot that ships with the majority of cards, and Force3D is able to push the clock speeds up a touch, which translates into performance that up to five percent better than a reference card. Priced at just under $300, which is around $40 more than the cheapest standard card, we reckon that it makes sense for those who want a quiet sounding solution that has room for extra frequency headroom. Force3D's effort is worthy of attention because it ships with a number of features not present in the reference design.