With being one Gig is a little low for those now in the demand of all powerful applications like Crysis and Flash player plus those annoying resource hoggers made by Microsoft. But making the 2 GB memory storage for the computer systems is an industry standard for the time being, even bumping the memory count to four or six GB is crazy enough, they have to buy an alternate OS to compensate the large page files. But for the graphics industry on memory, one GB is definitely enough for the main stream and high performance games; plus the help of the new RV770 core to calculate all of those numbers and shading units. And in the end, you can have a new and improved readily made by Sapphire; the new 4870 1GB GDDR5.
Going along Sapphires new approach with double the memory page size for an increased loading times and the better GDDR5 interface gives it a new height in bandwidth frequency having 900MHz and making 3.6GHz effective, giving more juice in the memory, is a 256-Bit interface, standard to all 4870’s. The core clock frequency is a 750MHz factory setting, which definitely means that the 4870 is a industry standard graphics but having a third party active cooling, to compensate the heat problem facing the reference cooler, only reading a few degrees cooler in the new dual slot aluminium and copper hybrid heat-sink and pipe, and the fan is keeping pace with the noise production, only having 35dBa in idle and 40 in load. But if noise isn’t your forte, this thing can still blow air in any direction and eventually goes out of the case.
Graphics performance in my view is all a bit mixed to me, with some games having help with Ati or NVIDIA guy to pimp up their ride in the game, give al the reason that NVIDIA and Ati con performance better in certain games, Plus the annoying introduction of the dubbed Physics driver in new NVIDIA cards to calculate far better and give great detail on games, but Ati is not a great follower with NVIDIA. So it is really up to the end user, who chooses the graphics they want to play in their exclusive games. But anyway we here to see noise, and by noise is the power this thing can produce. Crysis being far better in high res with no AAf in place, Far cry 2 and Company of heroes being a NVIDIA certified still played well with the 4870, quite well than the GTX280 in high to mid res configurations. Being an Ati however have some fatal flaws, more on the software driver is most of the performance blame, not able to play older games and a limited compatibility give the points down for Ati. But if you have the most of the recent games and a ready hand to download driver updates, this can be a fine and a cheaper line rather than having a NVIDIA graphics.
