Shane Baxtor08 July 2008, 8:00 AM
AMDs long awaited HD 4870 has finally hit the shelf; we have a look at it what it’s capable of and if it can knock the green team off its perch
The HD 4870 has been one of the most anticipated releases of the year, next to the GT 200 series from NVIDIA. It's finally time to see what AMD have been doing for the past eight months, and whether or not it was enough to be a serious competitor in the graphics card market once again.
The main focus for AMD is to offer the absolute best bang for buck; they have done this with the HD 4850 which is able to outperform cards like the 9800 GTX which sits around 50% higher in price. The HD 4870 is the big brother to the HD 4850 yet manages to carry with it an extremely aggressive price tag of only $449. It can be found even cheaper if you take the time to look around.
While the new HD 4870 might not carry features like CUDA and PhysX unlike its NVIDIA counterparts, the card really is a bit of a technological masterpiece. Where the GTX 280 and GTX 260 carry 240 and 192 Stream Processors respectably, the HD 4870 carries a whopping 800. Also included are 40 texture units and 16 render back ends.
What is quite interesting is the inclusion of GDDR5 for the first time on a graphics card. AMD has opted to use a 256-bit memory bus which is half of the GTX 280, but the inclusion of GDDR5 has boosted overall memory performance. Compared to the HD 4850 which has an impressive 2Gbit/s transfer rate, the HD 4870 and its 512MB of GDDR5 offers a peak rate of 3.6Gbit/s.
Out of the box, the HD 4870 comes with a dual slot cooler, much like the one we saw on the HD 3870. The Crossfire connector sits across the top of the card as does the two 6-pin PCI Express sockets. Sapphire hasn’t done heaps with the package; there’s the standard line-up of manuals and a driver CD. We also have a full version copy of 3DMark06, two molex to PCI Express connectors, S-Video to RCA convertor and a component-out dongle.
At the moment there hasn’t been a company to have done anything with clock rates. Our core comes in at a stock 750MHz while the GDDR5 comes in clocked at 1,800MHz DDR. While the clock on the memory might seem relatively low, massive amounts of bandwidth on offer from the technology means that you don’t need these extremely high speeds. As yields increase and production costs become lower, there’s no doubt we’ll begin to see GDDR5 memory get well and truly past that 2,000MHz barrier.
Placing the card in our X48-DQ6 testbed and firing it up had us listening to the fan spinning at full speed; it’s horrendously loud. Fortunately, this is all sorted out upon the installation of a driver. At load and idle we’re getting about 60dBs out of the card, which is pretty standard. On a system with a single hard drive, ROM drive, overclocked Q6600 and 2GB of memory, a single card is pulling at load 278W. If you feel like adding a second card into the mix, your system can peak as much as 480W with just these few items connected. It’s worth remembering the importance of a good quality power supply; for a single card we would recommend a quality 520W+ unit while for two cards you’re probably looking at the 650W+ area.
Performance figures find the card sitting between the GTX 260 and GTX 280 in most applications; it never beats the GTX 280 though, but you have to remember that it’s half the price. For the same price as a single GTX 280 you can have two HD 4870s, and as long as you have a board that supports Crossfire, you’re going to see the GTX 280 beaten most of the time for the same price.
While the HD 4870 isn't the fastesst single-cored graphics card on the market, its Crossfire price and performance is simply amazing. The price of a single card is extremely impressive and means that more people can get into high definition gaming cheaper than ever before. It seems that the HD 4870 has been worth the wait, and if you're looking at getting superb value for money, then it's really impossible to pass up.