Sapphire Vapor-X HD 4870 2G (Radeon HD 4870 2,048 MB)
To see all photos in our gallery for this card, click on the image.
Sapphire's Vapor-X cooler is quite effective. While other cards are equipped with thick, heavy, copper heatsinks and fans, the entire cooling assembly on this Radeon HD 4870 model measures only 3.54"x3.54"x1.18" (90x90x30 mm). It’s built on a flat copper plate with numerous aluminum cooling fins attached. The assembly looks like a cut-down version of the coolers that Intel or AMD bundle in their retail CPU boxes.
Inside the cooler, you’ll find an evacuated chamber, where water functions as a cooling medium. The water removes heat from the chips, and the vacuum promotes efficient heat exchange with the much cooler ambient temperature inside the case. This kind of phase-change cooling depends on evaporation at the heat source, when the heatsink makes contact with the chips and condensation at the outer reaches of the heatpipes, where thermal energy maintains constant circulation. Capillary action also aids circulation of condensed liquid back to the hot surfaces on their return trip.
Nevertheless, temperatures in this unit don’t differ much from the ATI reference design. In idle 2D mode, we got readings of 58° C/136.4° F instead of 60° C/140° F. Under heavy load, those tables turn a bit, with the Sapphire card reading 76° C/168.8° F and the reference card 74° C/165.2° F. The real difference in this cooling solution stands out in our noise measurements. At 2D idle mode, the Sapphire card is whisper-quiet at 36 dB(A), while it climbs only to 38.2 dB(A) under heavy load (by contrast, the ATI reference model ratchets up to 49.8 dB(A)).
In this design, the card also vents its exhaust through slits in the external connector edge. The vapor circulates down to the bottom of card to a secondary heatsink that cools the voltage regulator and various heavy-duty condensers. Because this card comes equipped with 2 GB of graphics RAM, you’ll also find heatsinks on its back side to cool those chips as well. Memory chips on the front are not cooled, however, because they’re not beneath the primary heatsink.
In overall performance, the Sapphire card falls between the overclocked HIS IceQ4+ and the Radeon HD 4870 reference card. The 2 GB of graphic RAM boosts frame rates in Fallout 3 by up to 7 FPS, and in Far Cry 2 frame rates at 1920x1200 resolution with 8x AA leap from a paltry 11.1 FPS (from the 512 MB reference card) to a fairly fluid 30.4 FPS. There isn’t much difference in other benchmarks, though. This card also clocks down to 500 MHz in 2D idle mode.
The Vapor-X card requires two six-pin PCIe connectors, so you’ll find two such adapter cables in the retail box. Its souped-up Radeon HD 4870 supports DirectX 10.1 with Shader 4.1. Other bundled goodies include the PowerDVD bundle, 3DMark Vantage Advanced Edition, Cyberlink DVD Suite v5 with applications, an ATI demo, a driver CD, and a CrossFire connector. Adapters aren’t really needed, because external ports include analog D-sub mini, HDMI, and DVI.
wtf?!
no 4850X2, are you people MAD?!
article after recent article tom's has recommended the 4850X2..so why isn't it in this chart???
cheers,
bill
p.s. stuff and nonsense: http://www.eupeople.net/forum
Good article. Can you do the same for SLI and Crossfire including the older cards? Then in the summary show the single and dual card tables side by side?
you guys should go see the comments on the US page...
Surprised that Sapphire submitted the old HD4850 model for testing, the newer one has a much better cooler and with the altered p-states (lowest is 160/250MHz!) its passive at idle.
LOL! Just had a gander at the US page as xizel suggested...
Wondered how Toms had suddenly reversed the set-in-stone law of HD4850>GTS250 and HD4870>(old)GTX260... Well, now we know. They cheated and used dodgy benchmarks (yet again, and I've been forced to say that line A LOT lately!) and then did their usual plug routine.
Looks like Toms is part of nVidia's TWIWMTBP program. Y'know, The Way It Was Meant To Be Paid. Mmm, payola time!
No idea why they still employ Kriess or Roos, no-one in their right mind can believe anything Toms says until those two are locked up on corruption charges in nVidia's inevitable Intel-style anti-competitive suit... XD
Tom's just wrote an article on the 4850X2, yet they fail to include it in the test.......smoke another one guys.
Yeah I agree Solitaire, they have always been Intel/Nvidia biased.
Seems The Last Remnant isn't Radeon optimised...wonder how much nVidia paid them
Upgrading soon, still debating whether to go Phenom II or Core i7 as the cost difference isn't as much as it used to be, but is still around 150+ quid more mainly because the motherboards are more expensive for Intel, plus the need for at least 3 sticks of DDR3...and it seems to me that using SLi/Crossfire on Intel chipsets appears to affect their performance compared to a dedicated chipset for SLi or Crossfire, as i get surprisingly similar results with a 4890 and an OLD Phenom 9850 @ just 2.8GHz...weird, isn't it? Pretty sure some driver trickery is going on here, too.
God, how big must their stockpile be? Or it's just a cheap easy way to make more money to bribe people. Lol.
God, TH has gone downhill hasn't it? I miss the old site layout too!
Also interesting that the Phenom/II based rigs still do really well in games...of course if i were encoding lots of porn to DVD i'd probably get a Core i7, like battle times of old Intel seems slightly faster at encoding.
Also, LOL @ nVidia for getting rid of more G92 based GPUs marked as a GTX250
Hmm.. down here, you can get 2x 4870 1Gb's for 150€/each, totalling the best thing you can get for under 300€. How's that for you?
well i like getting a good deal and i bought a radeon 4830 running it with a fx62 @2.8Ghz and i can play all games at HD with very playable framerates and i reckon if i crossfire it then i'll get about the same as a gtx280 for under £200 so why isnt the best budget card in the bench mark ?
ps toms hardware been using your site for years and years and its a great site well worth reading, sometimes does seem a bit biased one way or another which is fine cos if i was doing the job these big companys could buy my vote for a month or two as well
6gb ram on 32bit windows?
I am a big ATI Fan but upgraded my vga card about 7 months ago... went for the Asus 4870 1gb also tried the Shapire version but could not get it going on my dual screen vista 64 pc so had to swap it at the supplier for a Asus gtx 260 896mb .. must say great card and great software ... pitty I could not get the same support from ATi
I think the normalization is lacking a bit.
What I suggest is a method of weighing the average fps rates based on relevance: supposing the refresh rate of most monitors around these days is 60Hz, i would give 100 points to a card that achieves that value (60fps). A card that achieves less than that would get a percentage of those points (30fps->50 points), but for higher values the 'bonus' should not be as high (ie: for 120fps the card should NOT get 200 points because those extra 60fps are mostly irrelevant; maybe one point/fps over 60 resulting in 160points for 120fps or even half a point resulting in 130).
This would make extra 'power' more relevant in titles that actually NEED it.