MetaGaming

When it comes to bang for your buck, you can’t beat this card. The thing is a powerhouse. You can run just about any game out there in high resolution (1600×1050) at wonderful quality settings and still get a nice frame rate. This Sapphire card is built very nicely too. You get a temperature monitoring fan and some nice heat pipes to carry the heat away from the chips. Look at any professional review of this card and they’ll tell you that it’s absolutely worth the price.

The reason I take away one star from my review is because this thing is a power-hungry and space-hungry monster. At maximum, it consumes over 130 watts of power! It takes 2 6-pin PCI-E connectors, is the width of 2 slots on your motherboard and has a length that threatens to consume every last bit of space you have in your case. I had to do some major rearranging inside my case just to get this guy to fit in there, and it’s still tight! It also doesn’t help that the PCI-E power connectors hang off the back of the card increasing its length by a few centimeters.

It is recommended to have a 500W+ power supply just to keep this guy going, but that is the bare minimum. I would recommend nothing less than 600W or 750W if you plan on running 2 of these in Crossfire. I would absolutely not have the room to fit 2 of these in my case, so Crossfire is really not an option for me.

Back to the card… I am always impressed with the extra adapters and junk that come with ATI cards. You get 2 crossfire adapters, a DVI > VGA adapter and even a DVI > HDMI adapter. Oh, and of course they give you 2 4-pin power connector-to-PCI-E power connectors in case your power supply doesn’t have 2. Pretty sweet.

All in all, this is a great card that is easily worth the money, but is not built for the feint of heart. The thing sucks up major juice, space and puts out a ton of heat. I would definitely recommend, but make sure you got the gear to accommodate this beast.

Source: Eric Olstad from Amazon review

Buy the Sapphire Radeon HD4870 1GB DDR5 Dual DVI / TVO PCI-Express Graphics Card

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 8:20 am and is filed under PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.