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Palit - ATI Radeon HD 4870
First look and Installation
First thing that I noticed after I took Palit's Radeon 4870 out of the box was that unlike its younger brother - Radeon 4850, the 4870 is a dual slot design. The dual card design offers better heat dissipation by using the second slot as a vent at the cost of space. The space hogging abilities of the 4870 cannot be underestimated as it became more and more apparent after I had begun installing it into a mid tower case. After much struggle between the territorial turmoil of the water-cooling system versus the 4870, I found out that jamming two dual slot cards into a mid-tower while not impossible, proved to be very difficult. If you are one of the people that really needs to jam one of these hot cards into your midtower I suggest using a modular power supply to avoid any unnecessary clutter form the extra cables since you will need the space. After much struggle with the cards, I decided to go with the roomier full tower case.
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Another thing to be noted is the CrossFire ribbon connector. Similar to nVidia's design, the cable is flexible enough to bend and adjust to your motherboard's slot separation. Palit also threw in a couple of essentials along with the graphics card such as the VGA - DVI adapter, composite cables in case you wanted to hook up the graphics card to the TV and a molex to 6 pin adapter for older style PSUs. As you can see in the pictures, ATI did not adopt the 8 pin design of their rivals. All of the 4870s still have the twin 6 pin ports. Now that I had everything ready, I could not wait any longer to really turn up the heat on these graphics cards and see for myself what they were really capable of.
Benchmarks
All benchmarks were run in Windows Vista Ultimate with the Service Pack, latest updates and Catalyst 8.8 Drivers downloaded from ATI's web site.
PCMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage
CINEBENCH R10
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