Visiontek HD4870 Review

Testing:

Well now we get to what we have all been waiting for. I am going to put the Visiontek HD 4870 through a series of benchmarks to see where it stands in the vast world of all these graphics cards available to us consumers. I will also pit it against some of the newest video cards on the market as well as some seasoned models to see how it compares to the competition. For the testing, I will be running all hardware at their stock speeds, timings, and voltages so that there are no variables that may interfere with the scores and throw off the testing.

• 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): Visiontek 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:

• PowerColor HD 4870
• PowerColor HD 4850
• Asus EN9800 GTX
• XFX 9600GT
• Sapphire HD3870
• Asus 8800 GT
• XFX GTX 280
• EVGA GTX 260 FTW

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

• Visiontek HD4870 780/1080MHz

For the Visiontek HD 4870 I was only able to get a limited overclock on the GPU of 30MHz before it became unstable. This seems to be a pattern with the HD 4870 cards as I achieved the same GPU overclock on the PowerColor HD 4870 I reviewed earlier. On the memory I was able to push out 180MHz for a total speed of 1080MHz, or 4320MHz effective (1080MHz x 4). While this is not a high overclock, this was near the limit of what the Overdrive will allow the GPU to max out at. So the final overclock speeds which the benchmarks will be run at are 780MHz on the GPU and 1080MHz on the memory.

Benchmarks:

• Video:

1. Crysis
2. Knights of the Sea
3. BioShock
4. Call of Duty 4
5. World in Conflict
6. Call of Juarez
7. Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
8. 3DMark 06 Professional