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PowerColor's overclocked Radeon HD 4870 packing 1GiB of GDDR5

by Parm Mann on 21 July 2008, 10:45

Tags: PowerColor HD 4870 X2, PowerColor (6150.TWO)

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PowerColor seems to really enjoy tweaking AMD's Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards and coming up with non-reference designs that are likely to appeal to most.

Hot on the heels of its overkill Radeon HD 4850 with 2GiB RAM, the California-based manufacturer of graphics cards has a tasty-looking Radeon HD 4870 in the pipelines:

The card, pictured above by PCHGX.com, features an overclocked core speed of 800MHz, up 50MHz from AMD's reference design. There's a custom cooling solution designed by Zerotherm, and it promises to lower temperatures by as much as 20 degrees C.

One of the Radeon HD 4870's killer weapons, however, is the mind-numbingly fast GDDR5 memory, and PowerColor has doubled the amount from 512MiBs to a tasty 1GiB.

There's no word on pricing or availability yet, but it's one to keep an eye on.

Related reading

PowerColor readying overclocked Radeon HD 4850 with 2GiB RAM

HEXUS Forums :: 19 Comments

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Posted by deleted - Mon 21 Jul 2008 10:57
Forget the bizarre 2Gb 4850, THIS is a card to get interested in…

Benches please!
Posted by deleted - Mon 21 Jul 2008 11:31
Can anyone say ‘engineering sample’? The cooler looks like it's just been slapped on there :p
Posted by deleted - Mon 21 Jul 2008 11:53
Deleted
Can anyone say ‘engineering sample’? The cooler looks like it's just been slapped on there :p

i thought that to lol. Im probably wrong saying this but surely the results seen from this card will be a minimal improvement unless they changed the bus to 512 or 376, higher than the 256 currently? that would bottleneck it or am i just wrong where its negligable.
Posted by deleted - Mon 21 Jul 2008 14:07
Deleted
i thought that to lol. Im probably wrong saying this but surely the results seen from this card will be a minimal improvement unless they changed the bus to 512 or 376, higher than the 256 currently? that would bottleneck it or am i just wrong where its negligable.

The insane speed of GDDR5 makes up for the comparatively low memory bus (compared to GTX280). So, the 1GB version would be able to compete more effectively at very high resolutions or in games with very large textures etc, as I understand it. Also, I think Crossfire can benefit from both cards having more than 512MB of memory.
Posted by deleted - Mon 21 Jul 2008 16:32
the one reason to go for a Geforce GTX 260 over a Radeon HD4870 has just been removed.
I was concerned the 512MB whilst fine for current games would be to little too quickly obsoleted.

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