Advantages: Good value for money, Easy installation, Good idling heat Disadvantages: Requires 2 6-pin molex and 500w PSU
Recently, after getting some money i decided i would upgrade my Graphics Card. My old one was an ATI Radeon XT 2600 so i decided to stick with ATi instead of Nvidia, and i wasn't disappointed. I went on the internet and was looking at benchmarks and comparing them to price. i stumbled on the 4870 and the reviews and specs were perfect. IT came with256-bit memory interface, diretX 10.1 shading so you can play most new games on it on full settings. With 2 DVI ports, a 7.1 surround audio and HDMI compatibility, this was surely the card for me.
Once I got it out the box, i was surprised to see how small it was. Comparing it to the Nvidia GTX 260, it's about 5cm smaller, so can fit in a very small case. It requires 2 6-pin molex adapters, and a 500w minimum power supply. Really easy installation, but the instructions weren't very detailed ...
Advantages: Can run almost every game on highest settings, easy to overclock, very good memory speed. Disadvantages: No PhsX so some games can't run properly or even at all sometimes, some old games dont work.
The XFX ATi Radeon HD4870 1024MB GDDR5, is undoubtedly one of the best cards you can buy within it's price range (to name a few the Nvidia GTX 260, the Nvidia GTS 250 and the ATi 4850) it is able to play almost every modern game at highest settings at a playable speed. I say almost because because some games require Nvidia PhsX, and I say modern because some old games don't work on the graphics card, Quake III for example. Although Deus Ex Works, as do all of Valves games and Diablo II does, but it has graphical issues and can mess up the placement of your windows.
Visuals
Almost every game that I own I can run at highest settings with a flawless framerate, Crysis runs at about 20 FPS which is playable but not exactly flawless. It still looks absolutely amazing though and you completely forget the bad gameplay ...
Advantages: Powerful, excellent value Disadvantages: Only good at higher resolutions
The 4870 x2 has been here for a few years now, and has certainly made a place for itself among the graphics card market, rivalled only by possibly-over-the-top cards such as Nvidia's GTX 295, and recently, ATi's own HD 5870 (which is also the first DirectX 11 card on the market).
Setting up
The card is huge, taking up the space of two slots (which is to be expected of current cards) but also being long. I found that it fitted nicely in my Full tower case, though one should detemine the size of their case before buying the X2. In my opinion, if you are buying the 4870 X2, you should get a full tower anyway, as the cooling requirements must be considered as well. The card requires two PCI-E power connections- so be sure that your Power Supply is 'compatible' with the X2. The card uses the PCI-E 2.0 interface, which boasts higher ...
PRODUCT FEATURES: 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface Microsoft DirectXR 10.1 support Unified superscalar shader architecture 128-bit floating point precision for all operations Dynamic geometry acceleration Multi-sample anti-aliasing Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF) Depth and stencil texture (DST) format support Shared exponent HDR texture format support OpenGL 2.0 support ATI Avivo HD video and display platform ATI PowerPlay technology ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology
