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VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 512MB Video Card
Video Quality, Power Usage & Noise, and Overclocking
HQV
(Show All Graphs)
130
130
130
128
0
Score (out of 130, higher is better)
160
100
100
100
100
0
Score (out of 130, higher is better)
160
Without ATI-of-the-past's slight moire mangling, this video playback is really perfect. I don't expect this to falter with video cards of the future, but until we see perfect video acceleration on both sides at all price points, this test still has merit--with HD 4000 firmly at the top. 
Power Usage
(Show All Graphs)
39
43
67
75
0
Watts (lower is better)
250
95
104
125
191
0
Watts (lower is better)
250
And now it's plainly evident why the heatsink is loud. The card has to deal with a lot of electricity; it's not like it turns into bits. I say a lot relative to ATI's cards, but it's still efficient compared to high-end NVIDIA hardware. The fan bugs me, I think that's clear. It's not the volume of the thing, that part's tolerable. It's that the fan speed varies wildly once the chip hits 80 degrees C. It switches into blower mode, drops things to 79 for a sec, winds down, speeds up, again and again. Even if you weren't planning on scrapping the heatsink, consider changing its thermal paste. 
Overclocking
(Show All Graphs)
790
750
0
MHz
1500
1100
900
0
MHz
1500
So far, all of my 4870s have maxed out the Catalyst Control Center's overclocking ceiling of 790 core/ 1100 memory. The memory boost is great, because it's a real performance bottleneck, but speeding it up isn't the same as having more, and the core doesn't have much space to go up when it's stocked at 750MHz. The card runs hot, but I don't think it's a bad thing: at 80 degrees none of my cards have had overclocking limits.
Page 1: Introduction, First Looks, Specifications & Test Setup
Page 2: DirectX 10 Titles Page 3: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 4: Video Quality, Power Usage & Noise, and Overclocking Page 5: Conclusion 
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Add Comment
4 User Comments 1 - Posted by
aireiq
on July 22, 2008 - 5:22 pm > So why choose VisionTek over, say, Sappire? Because 'Sappire' doesn't appear to sell computer hardware? 2 - Posted by
Kurtis
on July 22, 2008 - 7:50 pm Nice catch. Annnnd fixed.
3 - Posted by
Brian
on August 7, 2008 - 4:45 pm Testing new spam defense system!
4 - Posted by
Brian
on August 7, 2008 - 4:47 pm Testing again
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