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Palit Radeon HD 4870 512MB Video Card
Video Quality, Power Usage & Noise, and Overclocking
HQV
(Show All Graphs)
130
130
130
130
128
0
Score (out of 130, higher is better)
160
100
100
100
100
100
0
Score (out of 130, higher is better)
160
Identical to a 4850 in this regard, a 4870 excels with video. That shouldn't be a problem for a flagship card, but there you have it. The previous subjective shortcomings of ATI's video processing, namely delays with moire compensation, are now gone. 
Power Usage
(Show All Graphs)
39
43
65
67
75
0
Watts (lower is better)
250
95
104
125
166
191
0
Watts (lower is better)
250
The 4870 breaks the mold here, for ATI. It uses a lot of power, 75W at idle. It's nothing compared to the 200-series NVIDIA cards, which is a feather in ATI's cap. The heatsink does an great job of cooling the card, and it runs cooler than a 4850--about five degrees cooler, in the 80 degree C area. It does this at a cost of peace and quiet. The fan would be a lot less aggravating if it ran at a constant speed; the thermal sensor varies the fan a lot and frequently, making its profile higher than if it just blew constantly. It's nowhere near as loud as a 200-series card, but it's still worse than a 3870. 
Overclocking
(Show All Graphs)
790
750
0
MHz
1500
1100
900
0
MHz
1500
The fan that cools, though, is the fan that overclocks. Unfortunately low, I hit the Catalyst Control Center's overclocking ceiling of 790 core/ 1100 memory. That's fine for the memory, stock clocked at 900MHz--a 22% overclock! This pays off particularly well since the memory is this card's real bottleneck. But the core only got a 40MHz increase, up from 750.
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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