Printable View
If there was one graphics card spectacular in 2008, it was the Radeon HD 4870 series. Yet this year a good number of games were released that actually make good use of a frame buffer larger than 512 MB.
Specifically at higher resolutions with a decent amount of Anti-aliasing and in DX10 games. Suffice to say we'll look at a 1 GB graphics card today. It's based on the Radeon HD 4870 and comes from HIS technology. The all new ICEQ4+ cooling based model.
ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 - GPU Specifications:
956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3/4/5 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
800 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Re-Z, and Z Range optimization
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
Accelerated physics processing
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
HIS submitted their Radeon HD 4870 not only with 1GB of memory, but it also comes with some customizations. And their reflective dual slot IceQ4 cooler is obviously present, and next to that this is the Turbo version, which boils down to the fact that the board is overclocked for you. Normally the Radeon HD 4870 would have a 750MHz core and shader frequency, and this model is clocked at 770MHz as standard for you. Next to that you will also gain some extra memory bandwidth as the memory clock is set at 4000MHz, which is 400MHz higher than the reference clock and these cards really love the faster memory.
So you always know what to look for in the stores, the packaging. Clean and simple, nothing wrong with that. The components are all well packaged. It's quite a good looking card really. It has a bit of a dark theme going on there, which we prefer a lot. The plastic is made out of UV reflective material, unfortunately most of the sticker is covering that effect up. Now due to the height of the cooler, the graphics card uses up two slots. And all the way to the left are two 6-pin power connectors and you will also find the CrossFire plugs. One molex converter is included should your power supply not have a second 6-pin connector.