XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX 1GB
Want to know what makes Radeon HD 4870 tick along? Head on over to our original review. It's no secret that ATI will be launching a revised mid- and high-end architecture pretty soon, but conjecturing on probable performance of future GPUs isn't entirely pragmatic.
XFX made a splash with its non-reference Radeon HD 4850 XXX which we reviewed a couple of weeks ago. The Radeon HD 4870 XXX 1GB, pictured on this page, is the fastest of a quartet of HD 4870 cards, but, sadly, ships with the cooler found on reference models. What this means is that it'll run hot; somewhat close to 90°C when under the cosh.
The XXX nomenclature indicates a healthy dose of pre-overclocking, and the card ships a core speed of 775MHz and GDDR5 operating at 3,800MHz, up from 750MHz/3,600MHz for default-clocked models.
The heatsink's fan is pretty quiet in 2D but can become aurally noisome when loaded by some 3D action.
Doubling the regular frame-buffer to 1GB, there's an inevitable price premium for this card. Online searches show it to be available for £178, which is some £35 more than a bone-stock, 512MB-equipped Radeon HD 4870. We'll see what benefits, if any, the larger frame-buffer has on high-resolution gaming.
A couple of six-pin PCIe plugs means that it chews through power - some 160W or so when under load.
There's not much more we can say when writing about the reference design; it's been out for over nine months. XFX differentiates its card via the use of a 1GB frame-buffer and reasonable factory-based overclocking on all fronts.
