Sapphire HD4870 Review

ajmatson - July 23, 2008
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Testing:

So is everyone excited yet? I know I am itching to see how well the Sapphire HD 4870 stands out among the rest of the pack in performance. For comparison, I am including two other HD 4870 cards, as well as an HD 4850 card to gauge the comparison difference between the two 4800 series models. I will also be including cards that are NVIDIA based, so you get a broad spectrum view on where the Sapphire HD 4870 stands among other popular cards on the market today. To keep the tests as fair as possible and to prevent any errors in testing, all hardware will be run at their stock speeds, timings, and voltages. This will give us an accurate representation of how each card performs to one another with no interferences.

Processor: Intel Q9450 Core 2 Quad 333x8
Motherboard: Gigabyte X48-DQ6
Memory: Mushkin XP2 Redline 8000 2 x 2GB 5-5-5-12
Video Card(s): Sapphire HD 4870 w/ Catalyst 8.6
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB SATA
Optical Drive: LG 20x DVD+/-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Sapphire HD 4870 785/1095MHz

This card was the best overclockable card I have tested out of the three HD 4870 cards I have reviewed. The limits allowable in the Catalyst Control Center are 790MHz on the core and 1100MHz on the memory. I was almost able to max them out with the Sapphire HD 4870 reaching 785MHz on the GPU and 1095MHz on the memory, for an effective speed of 4380MHz. That is a very fast memory speed. Anything higher and the screen would artifact or I would get a BSOD, so the overclocked tests will be run at 785/1095MHz.