XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX

The XFX ATi Radeon HD 4870 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, ...
...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 and the framerate. Red Alert 3 which is a stylistic beautiful game, runs smoothly and looks ... more

The XFX ATi Radeon HD 4870 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 and the framerate. Red Alert 3 which is a stylistic beautiful game, runs smoothly and looks amazing.

Installation

It requires two 6 pin molex connectors of your power supply, most good ones come with atleast one and an adapter which fits on the 2 pin connector. So you're more than likely going to be able to install it to the power supply with relative ease. It's a fairly big card so you'll probably need a full sized tower for it to fit. The DVI to HDMI cable adapter I got was faulty and has some loose connections so I get a flickering screen every now and then and have to wiggle it about to fix it.

Stability

It's never gone above 50 degress celcius for me unless I've been playing crysis on a fan speed of 50%. It's incredibly easy to overclock because the driver itself comes with options to do so, with the ATi Overdrive technology. It's very stable even on PSU's of just 500w (which is what I own). It's not caused my computer to randomly shut down once.

Overall

This is definately one of the best components you can buy if you want a budget gaming PC that packs a punch too, I bought it on a sale on overclockers ofr £100 and it's served me well ever since I don't think I'll need to upgrade for a good year or two. 

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