The overclocked MSI Radeon HD 4870 runs at 780 MHz (GPU) and 4,000 MHz GDDR5 RAM clock rate—the stock clock would be 750 MHz and 3,600 MHz. The graphics chip can handle DirectX 10.1, and the sample has 512 MB. At the 1920x1200 resolution with anti-aliasing, the MSI overclock results in a 13% boost in Crysis. When you consider all of the games of the benchmark suite as a whole, 3D performance increases by 3.5% over card at stock clocks.
Its toughest opponent is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 260. Due to the serious drop in prices, these cards are now much more competitively priced. AMD’s offering is a bit cheaper, but the GTX 260 compensates with that little extra bit of 3D speed. Still, AMD has the edge. The GTX 260, under load, is pretty loud. But it’s still much quieter than the other GT200-based card from Nvidia. AMD’s disadvantage is that power consumption in 2D mode is 147 watts for the entire system, though this is set to change with an upcoming driver.
The greatest advantage of the HD 4870 over AMD’s Radeon HD 4850 is its two-slot fan that expels hot air from the PC chassis. In 2D mode, AMD has taken acoustic output into consideration, but the slow fan speed means that the GPU temperatures hovers around 76 degrees C and more heat is transferred to other PC components. In order to avoid these high figures, check out the Gainward Expertool v4.0 for the 4870, which enables manual fan control.
The fan on our MSI sample gets alternates between loud and soft in 2D mode. The stock configuration, not overclocked, does not use this fan profile. Either the RPMs either remain constant on that board, or the change is too quiet to be heard. Under 3D load, the power supply for the test system using the Radeon HD 4870 draws up to 288 watts. A branded power supply with 240 to 280 watts and 20 to 23 A on the 12 volt rail should be sufficient for a standard system.
- Taxing Modern CPUs With Powerful Graphics
- Comparing The GPUs And Test Setup
- Radeon HD 4850
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4850
- Radeon HD 4870 OC
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4870 OC
- GeForce GTX 260 OC
- SLI With GeForce GTX 260 OC
- GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- SLI With GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- Assassin’s Creed v1.02
- Call of Duty 4 v1.6
- Crysis v1.21 High Quality
- Crysis v1.21 Very High Quality
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.4
- Half Life 2: Episode 2
- Mass Effect
- Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2
- World in Conflict v1.05
- 3DMark06 1280x1024 v1.1.0
- How Overclocking Affected The MSI Cards
- Overall Performance
- Price/Performance Comparison
- How About Graphics Image Quality?
- Power Consumption, Noise, And Temperature
- Frames-Per-Watt For The GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series At 1280x1024
- GTX 200-Series and HD 4800-Series At 1680x1050
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series at 1920x1200
- All Cards Compared At 1280x1024
- All Cards Compared At 1680x1050
- All Cards Compared At 1920x1200
- Is The Upgrade Worthwhile?
- Swapping Old Chips For New
- Evaluation Of The New Generation
- Conclusions – Radeon HD 4850 Is The Winner









My one complaint? Why use that CPU when you know that the test cards are going to max it out? Why not a quad core OC'ed to 4GHz? It'd give far more meaning to the SLI results. We don't want results that we can duplicate at home, we want results that show what these cards can do. Its a GPU card comparason, not a complain about not having a powerful enough CPU story.
Oh? And please get a native english speaker to give it the once over for spelling and grammar errors, although this one had far less then many articles posted lately.
Remember, the more you know.
but yes the article was off to a great start, maybe throw some vantage in there as well?
Precisely; several other websites tested with 8.7 and 8.8 long before this article was published. Why couldn't you? Look at the 8.6 release notes; it doesn't even mention the HD4000 series cards as supported devices.
Brilliant guys.
This is another reason why the results are tanked, in XP you get 15% more performance compared to these values
After having the Mythbusters appear, you would think this would be the most comprehensive, "scientific," factual, and update article meeting Tom's usual standards.... I didn't finish reading this.
(82 temperature in 2D 69 in 3D with no fanfix)
Also, I can understand why TH didn't have time to use 8.8 since it was released publicly on August 20, 2008 (Although ATI would have gladly released a beta version to TH for testing purposes).
However, AMD publicly released stable Catalyst 8.7(internal version 8.512) on July 21, 2008. That's more than a month ago. It has numerous improvements (for example, CF performance increase, improved stability and performance under Vista). To be honest, most of the improvements range from 4% to 15%. (In CF case, up to 1.7 X scaling)
TH has rarely been unfair and/or inaccurate and they always owned up to their mistakes before, and I trust them to re-test ATI products with at least 8.7 if not 8.8 to continue to uphold their values and integrity.
Now on to my criticism.
I can understand how you want to keep the results homogeneous with previous results but if you already know that a stock QX6800 will bottleneck the system, be proactive in fixing it. At the very least you should have done a small segment of the review showing the newer cards with a quad core overclocked to 4.0Ghz.
Also, if you have ever read any of the older Toms articles, you would know that you can still minimise the bottleneck from a slow GPU bye raising the resolution. Perhaps you should test the fastest cards at the highest resolutions?
I can also understand why you did not use the latest nVidia drivers. It takes time to create a review of this scale and the GF8/9 series drivers have been stable for some time. As the GT 200 series brings no new features to the table, they would needed little optimisation for their newer cards allowing the slightly dated drivers to perform nicely.
What I can not understand is why you would use ATI's 8.6 drivers??
The 8.7 drivers have been out for more than a month bringing quite a few fixes/optimisations with it. I understand it probably took more than 9 days to complete all of these benchmarks (today is the 29th, the 8.8 drivers were officially released on the 20th) but you should have called ATI and asked for their latest drivers. The 8.8 drivers were leaked at least a week before the official release which means, if you could nurture a relationship with the people you review, they could/probably would have provided them to you. There is still no excuse I can see for testing with the old 8.6 drivers. Seriously, it does not even have official support for the 48X0 cards...
From the title of the article,"The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head", I would have assumed that you would have been testing the Fastest 3D cards? What happened to your 4870x2? As you have already attempted to review it, we know you have your hands on one. How can you claim to review the "Fastest 3D Cards" and still leave out the fastest card?
In summation, I liked many things from this article. The layout was nice and a little more technical than we have been seeing as of late. I enjoyed the comparison charts at the end and I think you should adopt a similar method for the CPU and GPU charts. I would have thought this was an excellent and well thought out article if it had not been for the glaring and obvious deficiencies in reason. I give you credit for stepping Toms in the right direction. With a little more unbiased comparison, critical thinking and common sense I could come to see reviews such as this in a very positive light.