It's January, it must be upgrade time!

[KnSKranky]

Every January I do the same thing, wait for the price drops and then pull the trigger. Well this year, I landed a beauty. I picked up a Sapphire Radeon HD4870 512mb DDR5 for 249.99 at my local computer shop and I got the last one. A little price comparison revealed that this was cheaper than the etailers were offering it for by about 4-10 bucks.

I'm using Rivatuner to keep the fan at 45% and so far it idles at about 43C and loads at about 70-75C. I also like how it down clocks in 2D mode. IQ seems better plus colours are more vibrant than my 8800GT and am definitely seeing a performance boost at 16x10, my monitor's native rez.

Ta da! Here it is in all its glory.



Thanks for letting me indulge in a little hot air on this cold January day.


Cheers.

[Oversized Rooster]

Congrats on the 4870! A word of advice however - if you are going to OC it and play a game like GTA4, you may need to further increase the fan speed which will unfortunately make it loud.

I installed the Arctic Cooling Twin Turbo cooler on mine. I'm running 790 on the GPU and 4000 for the GDDR5. Idling at 40, loading at 58.

Watch out for the heat!

[KnSKranky]

Thanks for the heads up, even at 45% I find the fan a little on the loud side. lol

[Exmortis]

Nice card, just returned mine for a ASUS Dark Knight version,k my PSU went out hard and took my vid card, mobo and ram with it. worked out for 30 morte bucks I have 1GB memopry and better cooler. 4870s rock been running one since release. Cannot wait to get my new rig up with my new Phenom II 940, but I am about to start a week of travel status with work, so will be a while.

[KnSKranky]

I did have a few crashes and blue screens with this beast so far. This is what I've done to try and correct this. Ran Driver sweeper and made sure all my old nVidia display files were gone.(found a few). Installed the latest nforce drivers. reinstalled cat 812s and set the fan speed to 50% in Overdrive. Ran a couple of benches and 3dMk06 gave me 11527 which seems low considering my 8800GT scored the same. Lightsmark gave me 145.4fps @16x10 which seems right. So far, I've found my 8800GT way more stable than this card.