Sapphire Radeon 4870 Revisited
Introduction
In our recent look at the Smooth Creations LanShark, we had the opportunity to put the beast through several system benchmarks, including a few gaming ones, to evaluate its prowess. Smooth Creations made a special request that we have a separate look at the graphics card alone, a Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and we were more than happy to oblige.
Since we’ve also just updated our benchmark suite, now including Mirror’s Edge, Left 4 Dead, and Call of Duty: World at War, as well as a few other stalwarts, we figured it was a perfect time to revisit the 4870 on hand and see what it could do.
So today we’ll be examining the Sapphire 4870, albeit in a slightly narrowed capacity since it’s not a full retail sample. We do understand that the Radeon 4870 has been out for a while now, so we won’t delve into the architecture and so forth, but it still certainly appears to be a card that offers excellent bang for your buck, priced very competitively, and showcases some horsepower in some of today’s hottest games.
Let’s now take a closer look at the Sapphire Radeon 4870.