We have seen the new ATi market surging through the ranks, with the mainstream market being one o their heart highlights, plus the new flagship looks of dual core single PCB design and awfully lot of noise and also of heat produced by those core being too darn close and to darn power consumption monsters. But still gave the scores in all of the games its being thrown at, Crysis, facry2, and even some massive graphical outlooks in empire total war. But we are going to see another look to the single glory of the humble 4870 card.
With ATI and the likes of Sapphire, they have made a new phase for the future, but can be seen right now and here with the new 4870 Sapphire vapourX with double the amount of memory modules placed into a single die PCB, and still going about hovering in the $50 difference from the 1GB standard card 4870.
The card itself looks different to the reference design in many ways, the two most striking being the cooling solution and blue PCB. In addition to the main cooler we have a large heatsink on the power circuitry and on the rear of the card the memory chips also have their own heatsink (though the front chips have no heatsink). There are other changes which are not immediately noticeable, the first being the use of all solid state capacitors and the second being the use of custom chokes which Sapphire call “black diamond”. These chokes are 10% cooler than other models and provide 25% higher efficiency. Sapphire have clearly not cut any corners with the development and production of the 2gb card.
Sapphire have opted for three different display outputs on their 2 GB 4870, VGA, HDMI and Dual-Link DVI. While this makes the card very versatile and capable of supporting just about any display we feel that dual DVI or even DisplayPort would be a worthwhile addition.
Sapphire have taken ATI’s reference board as far as possible with the superb 4870 Vapor-X. They have all of the standard Radeon features present such as 7.1 audio over HDMI, Blu-Ray acceleration and DirectX 10.1 but the addition of a brilliant cooler keeps noise and heat to a minimum.
On top of that, the use of three different display outputs means the card will connect to almost any display currently available and when we factor in the extra 1GB of memory we have a very impressive product. We have yet to see such an impressive 4870 from any other manufacturer.
If there is one minor disappointment about Sapphires 4870 2 GB card it is that it would have been nice for them to push the clocks higher and ship as an enhanced model. The great temperatures achieved by the product give it plenty of scope for overclocking as our testing showed, so going that little extra would make this even more impressive. Of course there is nothing to stop end users performing the overclock themselves…
