The Card

Visiontek's HD4870 is a reference design board.  At present, there is only one HD4870 that Visiontek makes but I fully expect to see and overclocked version with a high output cooler strapped on in the near future.  For now though, we find a dual slot VGA solution with an oversized cooler and a red tinted acrylic shroud wrapping that assembly.  Measuring 9 5/8" in length, the Visiontek is not an especially long card and should fit in all but the smallest of cases. 

  

Native CrossfireX as you can see from the dual connection posts.  Want to double your fun?  Try two of these boys.  Each CrossfireX card comes with one bridge cable to connect the cards so with two cards you have the requisite two cables.

Power is fed in via two 6-pin PCI-E power plugs in the rear of the card.  Visiontek recommends using a minimum of a 500 watt power supply to run a single HD4870 and at least a 600 watt unit if you plan on running two in CrossFire. 

We find the reference cooler here with sporting a 70mm turbine fan.  Air is pulled in and blown over the heatpipe structure you can see through the acrylic below.  A thick copper base mates to the GPU that has its heat pulled in part away by two 8mm copper heatpipes through an aluminum fin grid.

  

From here, warm air is expelled out of the case at the slot cover.  This is a much better exhaust design than some of the single slot designs of recirculating the warm air back into the case.  Below the exhaust's finger guard are two DVI outputs flanking a single component out port.  Remember that this is no ordinary output.  The HD4870 supports HDMI with 7.1 surround audio as well as Blu-ray (assuming of course you have a Blu-Ray player in your rig.)

Taking the cooler off of the PCB, let's take a look at what lies beneath.

The HD4870's GPU runs at 750MHz and has a reported texture fill rate of 27.2 Gigatexels/sec and a Pixel fill rate of 16.8 Gigapixels/sec.  That is a lot of horsepower for a $300 card, or for that matter any priced card.  Also shown below is one of the GDDR5 memory modules sported by the Visiontek HD4870.  The card is packing 512 MB of memory on a 256-bit memory bus.  This was one of the big differences between the HD4850 and the HD4870.  The HD4850 sports GDDR3 memory whereas the big brother fully embraces the more advanced memory available today.  This GDDR5 is rated at 3.6GHz so well have to wait and see how well this gets the triangles moving.

  

A couple of quick shots of the detached cooler.  The large copper base you see below and its copper heatpipes/aluminum convection fins are not physically connected to the aluminum base plate of the rest of the frame.  Those thermal pads conduct heat off the memory modules to this aluminum base plate which isolates the GPU and memory heating sources from one another.  Both have air moved over them from the 70mm fan we saw earlier.

  

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Temperature, Sound, Test Bed
Pg 4 - Benchmarks
Pg 5 - Image Quality, Overclocking, Conclusion