The ATI 4800 series graphics cards have proven very popular and so has my review of the Gigabyte 4850 OC from back in Nov08. Here I’m reviewing one of the bigger brothers of the 4850. This 4870 is one of the first ATI offerings from the well respected XFX board partner.

Introduction

There are now a huge number of graphics cards in the ATI 4-series range. The 4870 which was the flag ship product has now been topped by the 4890 and the pricing has been adjusted to reflect this with the 4870 having dropped down to the ~£115 level. This has also squeezed down the prices of the 4850 and 4830 cards. So the 4800 range now goes from the 4830 at around £65 up to the 4890 at around £140. This should leave a suitable 4800 offering for almost anyone’s price point.

If you’ve missed out on the 4800 series info here a little recap on the spec of the 4870 compared to the 4850 and 4890. The 4870 and 4890 run the faster GDDR5 graphics memory whereas the 4850 is fitted with DDR3. The standard core clock speeds are 625MHz (4850), 750MHz (4870) and 850MHz (4890), although as always overclocked versions are available of all three varieties.

The 4850 and 4870 are available with either 512MB or 1GB of memory and the 4890 is available with 1GB memory. I wouldn’t recommend choosing a 512MB version of any of these cards, the 1GB versions are barely any more cost but offer significant benefit in higher end games at higher monitor resolutions.

Packaging

The packaging of this XFX 4870 card is very good as I’ve come to expect from XFX. The outer box is informative and attractive, although I’m yet to work out what the picture is supposed to be! Once you remove the outer cover, you’re greeted with a sturdy black cardboard box which I should think will have to be really abused to be damaged in any way.

The actually graphics card sits in a lower section of this box and on top of it you will find all the bundled accessories and instructions etc. Again the packaging has been well thought out and the accessories haven’t just been thrown on top of the card, XFX have gone to the bother of creating a cardboard insert to place these in. If you remove the cardboard insert then you get down to the card which comes wrapped in a protective anti-static bag.

It’s in this part of the box that XFX have managed to squeeze in their trademark lime green colour. Having been 100% Nvidia in the past the green was easy to include in swathes but green circuit boards and coolers really would be out of place in an ATI product. So it’s nice to see the green being limited to the cardboard insert and the XFX logos on the fan and shroud.

Contents

The accessories bundle contains all the usual cables and adapters that you would expect to receive with a product like this. There is a single crossfire bridge for if you fancy running dual card graphics, two adapter cables to convert 4-pin molex power supply cables to the required 6-pin PCIe, a DVI to VGA adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter and a TV-out to component adapter.

Additionally in the bundle you will also receive several bits of paper detailing instructions, promotional material and the usual and of course a driver CD. Amongst these I received a confusing leaflet detailing the power requirements which states in no uncertain terms that this is a high power card and as such you should not use molex to PCIe power adapters. Funny that they’ve included two such adapters in their cable bundle. Maybe XFX have corrected this error since I received mine or maybe what they really meant was that you should only use the ones supplied and not some cheap alternatives that may not be able to carry the same level of current. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that this XFX 4870 will require two 6 pin PCIe power connections, ideally these should be directly from the power supply but there are adapters included.

The 4870 card itself is based on a black circuit board and appears to follow the ATI reference design for a 4870. The card is 241mm in length and is a dual height card taking up two expansion slot positions in your PC case. The cooler is also based on the reference design and carries through the theme from the box front in the classic ATI black and red colours.

As a reference design PCB it should be relatively easy to find information about volt-modding this card. Usually the experts in the overclocking and graphics card enthusiast community base their volt-mods and other mods on cards that follow the reference design making it more difficult to mod a card based on a 3rd party deisgn.

Installation

So on to installing the card then. It’s pretty much like any other graphics card. Un-install the driver for your old graphics card and then turn the PC off making sure that all power is fully drained by unplugging from the mains and then pushing the power button. Open the PC case and locate an appropriate PCIe 16x expansion slot, remove the backpanel blanking plates (note the 4870 takes up two positions) and slot the card in to place. Secure the card with screws or if your PC case supports it, tool-less clips.

Then before you get all excited and try to turn back on don’t forget to connect the graphics card to your power supply. For this you will need 2 6-pin PCIe connectors either directly from the power supply or by using 1 or more of the supplied adapter cables.

Once the card is installed in the PC, power up the PC and install the drivers. Never install the drivers on the disk that you get with any hardware product without first checking the manufactuerers website for later versions. This is especially true with graphics cards. The latest drivers are available for download from the ATI website, use these as they will have significant performance improvements over the original issue drivers found on the CD, which by the time the product reaches you will be a long way out of date.

Performance

Just before talking performance figures and fps I’d like to just make a short comment on the cooler. The 4870 reference cooler design is a dual slot type that exhausts from the case. To make sure that the cooler isn’t noisy, the reference card reduces the cooler’s fan speed down to a minimum and only then increases the speed if the temperature gets too high.

Most enthusiasts seem to consider the temperature that these cards reach before the cooler really kicks in with any effect to be much too high. Hence the 4870 with reference cooler is consider to ‘run hot’. Of course temperature is all relative and if ATI consider that 100°C to be fine for the RV770 chip then who am I to argue.

I, like many other users would like lower temperatures and this can be achieved by running the fan faster or replacing the cooler with an alternative but if you are not planning on overclocking the card then I don’t see the high temperatures as a problem myself. At least they’ve managed to release a reference model card that doesn’t make a whole load of noise all the time.

OK, on to the gaming performance then – after all isn’t that what you’ve been waiting for all along. First off I ran the usual synthetic benchmarks 3dMark03,05 and 06. Then I moved on to some real game benchmarks, Half Life 2:Loast Coast, Track Mania Nations, X3 Terran Conflict and GTA4. Finally I ran FRAPS while playing some actual games, GTA4 and Left4Dead. For the actual gameplay testing I took two results using FRAPS and averaged the fps results for min, max and average. I set FRAPS to record fps for 5 mins to make sure that it more accurately matches the kind of game play that you might experience in real life and I play through a familiar level/section to ensure that I can do it repeatably.

For comparison purposes my test system for this card was as follows:

• Intel Q9550 CPU 2.83GHz
• 4GB of OCZ DDR3 Reapers 1333MHz
• ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard
• Kingwin 900W Mach1 Power Supply
• Samsung 250GB SATA2 Hard Drive
• CoolerMaster Centurion 532 Case
• Samsung 20″ Widescreen Monitor

This should provide enough testing headroom for the 4870 to stretch its legs fully. Default clock speeds were used throughout.

FutureMark 3DMark Benchmarks

These are good results for the 4870 in Futuremark’s 3dmark benchmark tests, however these are synthetic benchmarks and are probably too well written as they get the max out of any graphics card. Games on the other hand can be a bit more picky.

Game Benchmarks

As you can see from the table of results, the 4870 performs very well and is a definite improvement on previous generations of graphics card. The data just goes to show how easily a modern graphics card copes with Half Life 2 these days. Achieving a 58 fps average in the GTA4 benchmark is no mean feat though. Many people say the GTA4 benchmark is not a good estimation of actual in-game performance, which is true but it does provide a quick and easy direct comparison. However with that in mind, my next two graphs are actual in-game stats taken using FRAPS while actually playing the games.

Grand Theft Auto 4 Performance

The GTA4 result above was with all textures set to their max (high or very high) and with the draw and view distances set to 30. I consider these results with a minimum of 25fps to be on the edge of playable but this is a demanding game and at these settings it does look really good.

Left 4 Dead Performance

Clearly Left4Dead is no match for the 4870. It runs through my testing without even blinking and remember this is on maximum graphics settings and maximum in-game AA and AF. If you play a lot of Source engine games then the 4870 will certainly cut the mustard, I would also expect this to be well above playable on higher resolutions than the 1680×1050 tested here.

Conclusion

In some ways it’s difficlut to write a conclusion for the 4870. All the graphics cards in the ATI 4800 range from the lowly 4830 up to the 4890 are worth buying if that’s your price point, at the moment they seem well spread and I would thoroughly recommend buying the one your budget can stretch to.

As for buying the XFX version, it seems that XFX have done a good job putting this card together. It’s not factory overclocked and in fact it’s reference design in every way as far as I can tell. This makes it no different from an equivalent Gigabyte or HIS board etc. However, owning a reference design is benefitial when it comes to fitting a waterblock or third party heatsink and also when finding out modding details for voltmods etc.

The one thing that does make the XFX version standout from the crowd at the moment is the pricing as these seem to be coming in a little cheaper at the moment. If you buy it you certainly won’t be disappointed but then I don’t believe you’d be disappointed buying a 4850 either if that was all your budget would allow.

Overall Score: 8/10

If you’ve enjoyed reading this review you might also be interested in…

Overclocking: Maximum unmodified overclock for Gigabyte 1GB 4850
Review: Gigabyte HD4850 1Gb pre overclocked – (GV-R485OC-1GH)
Review: XFX GeForce 7900GS Graphics Card

Popularity: 14% [?]