The XFX has some explaining to do with the new ATI and NVIDIA cooperation deal, while still having the baggy green brand and still showed the new GTX 285 and the GTX295 flagships, it will in soon deliver the new type of brand their own GFX branding going with the flagship ATI card the 4870X2 graphics solution and first of the ATI single graphics solution the 4870 1 GB versions, and all have the same categories the original reference core and memory speeds the extreme edition, about 5-10% speed increase of the frequency and the xXx edition sporting a much higher clock speed, at least 50MHz to 100Mhz difference from the stock clock speeds.
So the GFX series start off with the single core flagship the 4870 1 GB version, with the same reference cooler that ATI brought to the HD-4000 series still the red look and still produces the noise levels as before and still is a double PCI slot form factor. While the difference as you can see here is the custom made black CPB board with large enough space to house all of the transistors and the memory chips and GPU and also having dual size pin power connectors able to handle in most situations the limit of a 800W PSU can give out. Well thermal design of the board is rather simple the same as the previous reference ATI cards the core is placed in the middle of the card PCB and the 256-bit memory interface chips are all located around the GPU to maximise the length near the GPU for fast access rather than wasting the valuable PCB space for a few transition lines going to and from the GPU and memory chips. Why I am saying this probably having a test design layout of the graphics card form any ATI certified makers and the XFX version of it, but most of are in the recommended layout form AMD so there is really no change. While the xXx version of the 4870 1 GB is a core frequency of 775MHx just a few MHz more form the offering in HIS Ice Q, and also in the memory clock speeds it has 3800MHz effective able to transfer as much as 38.5Gb/s of data to and from the GPU.
While performance mark show it is a little low of the more experience ATI makers like HIS and Sapphire, only going at about 1-2fsp faster and slower from the two veterans, but able to mix the scores of both of them making a XFX a hard one to consider eve as fast as it is it only comes up in the middle of the table of the offering of other ATI rivals. Most of the time XFX did are good job taking the XFX 4870 into the red zone and able to keep it up with NVIDIA’s standards, but overall a good made and built form XFX and also comes with game and all of the usual extras in XFX.
