Testing and Overclocking:

Testing is going to be done with a variety of synthetic benches as well as actual games.  The results will be compared to an XFX 9800GTX 512MB card, an XFX 8800GTS Alpha Dog Edition 512MB card, and an Sapphire HD3870 Toxic Edition 512MB card.  Synthetic benches were tested using the benchmarks standard settings.  Games were tested using 1920 x 1200 and 1680x1050 at high settings and 2xAA.  Anything other than that will be listed.  ATI cards were tested using the Cat 8.8 drivers and the NVIDIA cards used the 175.16 drivers.  The test system is as follows.

I used a combination of programs to overclock the card.  Among them are the Overdrive function built into the Catalyst control panel, AMD GPU clock tool and Rivatuner.  The factory settings are 780 core and 1000 memory.  This is bumped up slightly over the reference clocks of 750 and 900.  ATI Overdrive took the core all the way up to 810 core and 1125 for the memory.  This was quite a bit more than I got out of the reference HD4870's that I've tested.  However, this wasn't stable.  The final stable overclock was 800 core and 1100 memory.  This was still more than I got from the reference cards.

3DMark06:

Futuremark's 3dMark06 has become the go-to benchmarking tool when it comes to synthetic benchmarking.  Love it or hate it, there is no question that 3DMark06 is the measuring stick of video card performance industry wide.

We will be using Version 1.1.0 professional.  The free downloadable version can be found here.

The sapphire HD4870 is about 3% faster than the Visiontek HD4870.  Let's break down the test and compare each stage of 3Dmark06.

Page 1: Intro Page 2: Specs & Features Page 3: The Bundle & Layout Page 4: Vapor-X Cooling Page 5: Overclocking Page 6: Benchmarks Page 7: Games Page 8: Conclusion