Visiontek ATI Radeon HD4870 512MB GDDR5 PCI Express Video Card Review :: Visiontek ATI HD4870 512MB GDDR5 PCI Express Card

The HD4870 from Visiontek is a dual slot cooled card, meaning that the card takes two adjacent slots on the motherboard to install, a PCI Express Generation 2.0 x 16 slots, and the slot next to it. Visiontek uses the reference cooler which has the RADEON HD 4870 name, 512MB, and the company logo on the front. A 49-fin fan covers the rear of the front of the PCB, blowing air through the card out the grill of the front of the card.

Card front

Fan

Top view of card

PCI Express

The HD4870 is a PCI Express Generation 2.0 card. This means that the card has about twice the bandwidth available to it from the motherboard chipset to the card at about 8GB/second when an x16 slot is used. PCI Express 1.0 allowed about 4GB/Second bandwidth between the card and the motherboard chipset.

Rear of PCB

GPU mount

Serial number

Bottom view

ATI has chosen to clock their reference 4870 at 1.8GHz for the memory with a 256-bit memory bus interface. Double Data Rate memory bandwidth is effectively doubled, meaning that the effective speed is 3.6GHz. The total memory bandwidth on the HD4870 card is 115.2GB/second, which is much higher than the HD4850 which uses 256-bit bus with only 1GHz speed.

IO

Top view of power

Rear of front of PCB

Rear view

Visiontek’s card comes with two Dual-Link DVI connectors for dual monitor use. The end-user can use two HDMI adapters to use two monitors with HDMI connections, two DVI monitors, or even two CRT monitors with adapters. The card also has a HDMI audio port, allowing the video card to do 7.1 audio. The last port on the IO is a HDTV Out port allowing the video card to be attached to a HDTV set with included cable. HD4870 cards require two 6-pin power connectors to power them and the 6-pin power connectors are on the rear of the card one on top of the other allowing for easy installation of the power cords.

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