Palit HD 4870 512MB Video Card Review :: The Bundle and Temperatures

• Radeon HD 4870 512MB Dual Sonic card
• Manual
• Driver CD
• DVI to D-sub adapter
• DVI-HDMI Adapter
• Molex to 6-pin power adapter

Palit has started including games like Tomb Raider Anniversary with some of their new cards that have hit the market in recent months. In this case they declined to include a game in their bundle. Saving costs by not including a game is ok since most games get rather old fast in terms of longevity. For the enthusiast wanting a new game it is cheaper and often more cost effective to buy it from a store than get it in a video card purchase.

The hardware part of the bundle matches quite well with Palit’s card. The HDMI to DVI adapter allows the end-user to use their new HDMI HDTV or monitor with this card. The D-sub adapter allows the use of a CRT monitor with this card. Frankly, if you’re buying this card I would strongly suggest buying a new monitor if you are still using CRT monitors. The driver CD comes with the standard ATI drivers from when this card was packaged. I would suggest downloading the latest drivers from ATI as they support the chipset.

One thing that I felt was important in testing this card was testing the noise and temperatures of the card. Noise levels of the system operating with the dual fan HD 4870 were much louder than that of the standard reference HD 4870. Temperatures, on the other hand, were noticeably lower across the board with Palit’s card versus the ATI reference HD 4870. Idle temperatures on the HD 4870 from ATI ranged in the 57C level. The Palit card had idle temperatures of only 43C a huge difference. Load temperatures on the Palit card reached 57C compared to 82C on the ATI reference card. Note that all temperature testing was done with ATI’s Overdrive utility and HWMonitor’s GPU utility. I ran 3DMark Vantage with both running.

ATI calls their drivers Catalyst drivers. They have improved their drivers dramatically from the days where they would lower the quality of the AF or benchmark settings to get a better score. Their drivers are among the best in the business. The Catalyst Control Center is the name for their control applet that controls the various settings of the drivers. CCC is broken down into Information Center, Displays Manager, Display Options, Digital Panel 3 (or CRT or HDTV depending on what is connected), 3D, Color, Avivo Video and Overdrive.

The Information Center is where the hardware and software is identified in the drivers. The 3D menu is where Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, Catalyst AI, Adaptive Anti-Aliasing, and other 3D settings are enabled or disabled. Color is where the color tint or hue is set. Avivo Video is where the various video settings are set when they are played back. ATI Overdrive is where the video card is overclocked. I was able to overclock the Palit card from 775/1GHz to 780/1086. As the card is already overclocked this was a nice surprise.

Driver screenshots