Asus ATI Radeon HD 4870x2 edges competition…

Category: Review on Asus ATI Radeon HD 4870 2 Gb PCI-e Graphics Card

Posted by: 25-Jun

Strengths: High FPS, cooling, DirectX 10.1 support, price

Weaknesses: Size, power consumption

Asus has for long tried to offer functionality at lower prices than its competitors. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 2GB graphics card was one which was long anticipated to be a competitor for the colossal NVIDIA series.

The 4870 X2 essentially is a pair of RV770 GPU cards combined on a single card – termed as Crossfire. It is compatible with both Intel and AMD chipsets, making it versatile.

The Radeon HD 4870 has almost twice as much memory bandwidth as its predecessor -the HD 4850 and has a huge memory bandwidth advantage over its competitors. However, its texture filter rate is low losing out to other cards. Also, the power consumption is very high compared to its counterpart from NVIDIA.

The card boasts of DirectX 10.1 support, and it’s 2GB of DDR 5 video memory posts a faster clock speed than the 1.792MB of video RAM on its counterpart, the GTX 295 from NVIDIA. The ATI Overdrive facility built into the driver control panel finds favour among advanced users. The card comes with copper bases linked to a finned copper heat sink on a sturdy metal frame ensuring sufficient cooling and structural rigidity.

On the overall, Asus and ATI have delivered on their promise with features like high resolution, high quality textures and amazing FPS values (Frames per second) making the card a must buy among hard-core gamers.