DH Review: Sapphire 4870 & VisionTek 4870 CrossFire

***craig5320*** · Jul 8, 2008, 10:01 AM

Read The Review Here
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Today's review product, the Radeon HD 4870, goes some way to rectifying AMD's hole in the market as it is priced to challenge the GTX 260. We will be running the products through a variety of tests including gaming at 2560x1600, CrossFire and high definition playback to find out which company is most deserving of your hard earned cash.

mike2h · Jul 8, 2008, 11:32 AM

thx for all the work.... wich ended up in another great review!
got a question. int the conclusion it was implied that a gtx 280 performs on sinilar level as 4870 in crossfire. is this the case? i was actually considering buying the 4870 because of its perf/price ratio & i figured by the time i got around to doing crossfire(only option on my intel platform) the ywould have most probs worked out. but if i can get similar performance from a single card that runs cooler & will be cheaper overall....

LukeK · Jul 8, 2008, 03:19 PM

Pretty good cards the 4870s thats for sure, 280 prices are dropping though, I saw a 280 GTX for around 330 recently which makes it better value IMO considering it seems to perform as well as two 4870s currently. Then bear in mind you dont have to worry about dual driver support. Crossfire has never been that great.

humonous · Jul 8, 2008, 03:23 PM

4870s seem the first really good card ATI has put out in a long time, good price too. 280 is obviously a superior card but you pay for it and I dont think maybe people need the performance. 30 inch screen maybe. I wouldn't touch crossfire myself but a single 4870 seems a decent card. I just am not sure of ATIs drivers, my last expericences with them a year ago were less than positive.

brutusmaximus · Jul 8, 2008, 03:25 PM

personally I wouldnt care if the 4870 was 25% less I still wouldnt be tempted. good value if someone else made the drivers, thats my view on it anyway.

Alex · Jul 8, 2008, 03:30 PM

I dont really agree. I think their drivers are pretty decent lately, have no idea about dual card but they are a lot better than this time last year.

I still dont think they are quite as good as the Nvidia sets, but the 4870 is a killer board.

***Veridian3*** · Jul 8, 2008, 04:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mike2h

int the conclusion it was implied that a gtx 280 performs on sinilar level as 4870 in crossfire. is this the case? .

Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting instalment

mike2h · Jul 8, 2008, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Veridian3

Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting instalment

tease

hopefully now that ati seems to be getting bk into seriously competing hardware-wise(at least in the segment they have chosen) they will also put the hammer down on their driver development section to. they got to know this an issue for overall sales.

Judas · Jul 9, 2008, 10:14 AM

so ati's hd4870 now does PiP playback (2 video streams correct?) overall better then nvidia does....

vs the hd3870 where it wasn't as good.. (in the hidef article)

hmm, powerdvd removed aero support while playing back reguardless of the product being used now?... when did this happen

swimtech · Jul 9, 2008, 01:00 PM

Another great review - what a wide range of results!

I understand this was a review of the two 4870 cards, but I couldn't help noticing that a conclusion could also be drawn about the 4850 card included in the review. From what I noticed in the results, it looks like that - for resolutions of 1920x1200 or lower - the single 4850 card is the rough equivalent of the 3870 X 2 OC card included in the review across the wide variety of games, give or take - you think?

***Veridian3*** · Jul 9, 2008, 05:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Judas

so ati's hd4870 now does PiP playback (2 video streams correct?) overall better then nvidia does....

vs the hd3870 where it wasn't as good.. (in the hidef article)

hmm, powerdvd removed aero support while playing back reguardless of the product being used now?... when did this happen

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews....=583&pageid=21

There is more about it there.

***Veridian3*** · Jul 9, 2008, 05:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by swimtech

Another great review - what a wide range of results!

I understand this was a review of the two 4870 cards, but I couldn't help noticing that a conclusion could also be drawn about the 4850 card included in the review. From what I noticed in the results, it looks like that - for resolutions of 1920x1200 or lower - the single 4850 card is the rough equivalent of the 3870 X 2 OC card included in the review across the wide variety of games, give or take - you think?

The 4850 is indeed very competitive with the X2, it also has the benefit of being cheaper and not relying on driver profiles.

Mudman · Aug 2, 2008, 09:48 PM

This is my first time here on driver heaven. I'd just like to say that I've read a number of your reviews and they've all been of high quality, really well presented and very helpful. The only sticking point I found with this review was it's unfair to compare 4870 in crossfire to the GTX 260 which only has a single GPU and considering the similar price between the two individuals cards I would have liked to see a comparison between the SLI and CF set ups. Even though the Motherboards with nvidia's new 790i chipsets are a little more expensive than their intel counterparts.