Diamond HD4870 1GB Review

gotdamojo06 - October 20, 2008
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Testing:

I am very interested and excited to see how the new Diamond HD4870 1GB from ATI will compare when it is tested using a few different video benchmarks to measure the card's performance. I will be putting the Sapphire card up against a few different video cards that are out on the market. I am also extremely interested in seeing how the cooling solution Diamond has added to its HD4870 is going to handle the temperatures. All of the settings will be set at stock for all of the cards; I will also be overclocking the HD4870 to the maximum level so that I can compare the difference in performance when overclocked, and see how beneficial it is to overclock all components in your system.

Testing Setup:

Processor: Intel Core2 Quad Q9450
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6
Memory: Mushkin XP2 Redline 8000 2 x 2GB 5-5-5-12
Video Card: Diamond HD4870 1GB
Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
Hard Drive: Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: Lite-on DVD-RW
Case: Cooler Master Cosmos S
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Diamond HD4870 1GB Core - 780MHz Memory - 934MHz

When it came down to overclocking the Diamond HD4870 1GB card, I ran into a few problems, the first thing that I ran into was the inability to overclock the memory over 940MHz with out recieving artifacts on the desktop. This is due to the larger amount of GDDR5 memory that is installed on the card. The other problem that I had was getting the core any where near 800MHz, again with out getting any artifacts on the desktop. I feel that the reason the overclocking ability of this card is so low is due to the large amount of memory that is installed on the card using up some of the extra power that is transfered to the card.