Sapphire HD 4870 X2 Video Card Review
Introduction (Cont’d)
Contents
We removed the video card cooler to take a look. The cooler is all made of copper. During our benchmarking we were really disappointed by the standard AMD cooler. The air blowing out from the cooler was as hot as 73° C (163° F) and the temperature on the metallic part of the cooler was at 70° C (158° F). We hope that AMD partners launch models using a better cooling solution. Sapphire and HIS are the most probable candidates, as they like launching models with solutions from Arctic Cooling. If you are really worried about the hot air generated by this monster you should really think on water cooling, and Asetek announced today a water cooling solution for Radeon HD 4870 X2.
Figure 5: Video card cooler.
On Figures 6 and 7 you can see the video card without its cooler. It uses sixteen 1-Gbit Hynix H5GQ1H24MJR-T0C GDDR5 chips, making its 2 GB memory (1 Gbit x 16 = 2 GB), 1 GB per GPU. These chips can officially work up to 1 GHz, so there is 11% headroom for you to overclock the memories keeping them inside their specs. Of course you can always try to push them above their official specs.
Figure 6: Sapphire HD 4870 X2 with its cooler removed.
Figure 7: Sapphire HD 4870 X2 with its cooler removed.
In Figure 8, you can see all accessories and CDs/DVDs that come with this video card. With the accessories that come with this card you can convert the video output to VGA, HDMI, component video and composite video, plus the DVI and S-Video connectors already present on the product.
Figure 8: Accessories.
This video card comes with three games inside a DVD called “Ruby ROM 1.1”: Call of Juarez, Dungeon Runners and Stranglehold. Programs that come with this video card include CyberLink DVD Suite (PowerProducer 4, PowerDirector 5 Express, Power2GO 5.5, Mediashow 3 and trial versions of PowerBackup 2.5, PowerDVD Copy and LabelPrint 2), Cyberlink Power DVD 7, 3DMark Vantage Full, EarthSim and GameShadow.
Now let’s compare the Radeon HD 4870 X2 specifications to its main competitors.