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Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB TOXIC Video Card
Video, Power, and Overclocking
HQV
130
130
130
128
0
Score (130 = highest)
149.5
HQV
100
100
100
100
0
Score (100 = highest)
115
Like all 4000-series cards, Sapphire's 4870 excels with video. 
Power Consumption
(Show All Graphs)
45
56
67
80
0
Watts (lower is better)
149.5
104
120
121
130
0
Watts (lower is better)
149.5
I'm surprised that there isn't any difference with power consumption. Which is a good thing, since the card can only really consume more power. The overclocking doesn’t come out of over-volting, just good silicon binning. But, like most would have suspected, the clear victory is in noise reduction. Thermals, at stock, temperature-controlled speeds, were easily fifteen degrees cooler than a normal heatsink. Twenty degrees, given the right case and airflow, is doubtlessly possible, as this card didn't break 65 degrees under load in my testing. The variation in noise tone while the fan's speed matched the GPU temperature was muted, although the fan was audible at both load and idle. But hang on. I went ahead and manually set the fan speed to a fixed 25%--I couldn't hear the difference up to about 35%, but for the sake of setting the fan to its slowest--and the GPU never got past 75 degrees. It was inaudible at such low fan speeds, and still cooler than a stock heatsink by about ten degrees. Definitely worth holding out for. 
Overclocking
(Show All Graphs)
820
780
0
MHz (higher is better)
1322.5
1150
1000
0
MHz (higher is better)
1322.5
Not to be content with CCCs defaults, this card has added overhead in Catalyst Control Center's overclocking page compared to regular 4870s. The card hit the GPU utility ceiling of 820MHz, and I suspect there are 20-30 more under the hood for Riva tuners. The memory hit 1150 MHz, though, which was just awesome. That's an overall 10% over factory clocks, but an impressive 20% improvement over stock.
Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Specifications and Setup Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 6: Conclusion 
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