Review: Sapphire Radeon HD4870 graphics card

This graphics card from Sapphire is the first we’ve seen that uses AMD’s latest version of the RV770 GPU, namely the HD4870.

The GPU’s architecture is very similar to the HD4850 we reviewed last month; the cores are 55nm, have 965 million transistors, 800 stream processors and 40 texture units.

The core speed of the HD4870 has risen from the 625MHz of the HD4850 up to 750MHz, but the biggest change is in the memory.

The 512MB of Ram memory runs at 900MHz, but thanks to it being GDDR5 memory, the effective frequency is 3.6GHz at just 1.5V.

Using GDDR5 memory has also allowed AMD to fit a smaller 256-bit memory bus without any impact on memory bandwidth, as GDDR5 offers around twice the bandwidth of GDDR3/4. In the case of the HD4870, that works out to a massive 115Gbits/sec.

The performance of the HD4870 is very good when you consider it’s essentially a mainstream card. At a resolution of 1,280x1,024, it produced a 3Dmark06 score of 16,965, while in Crysis with all details set to high it produced a very playable score of 53.54fps. To give an idea of the rendering potential of the card, this only drops to 46fps when 4x anti-aliasing and 4x antroscopic filtering are turned on.

Rated at 160W, it’s good to see that the HD4870 uses two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors instead of opting for an 8-pin version, which you will only find on the latest PSUs. Sapphire includes two Molex-to-6-pin connectors in the box just in case your power supply doesn’t have the necessary connectors.

Unlike its smaller sibling, the first crop of HD4870 cards use a twin-slot cooling solution, but further along the line we should see some companies offering alternative cooling designs.

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