My Experience with ATI HD 4870 Graphic Card

By now, you would have realize the hype and wave that the ATI HD 4870 graphic card has be stirring up. Over here, I will not go over the technical details. If you would like to read a review, go here.

Rather, I will share with you my personal ownership experience. I chose the Power Color version of the card. mainly because of its competitive pricing and one of the better known brands.



The retail box is not a very large one, unlike some other graphic cards which go over board with it. Upon unwrapping the contents, you will notice that the package includes the card itself, an installation disc, a D-sub adapter, a HDMI adapter, some screws and a puny little leaflet they call a quick guide.

They might as well leave out the quick guide, as it is useless and provide little information as to how to install the graphic card for someone who might not be very well versed in PC hardware and upgrading.

Make no mistake, this is one large graphic card. If you have a full tower casing, chances are that you will have no problems installing it. For me, I own a mid tower casing, and it is pretty much a challenge getting it to fit. There are 2 reasons for this. One is that it leaves minimal spacing between the card itself and the hard drive cage, and two, my PSU comes with rather thick cables. In fact, I have to remove my hard disk cage to get everything tightly fitted.

Once every was hooked up, powering up the PC, the card fired up in little fuss. There was just a short burst of the fan noise when starting up. Nothing more. I heard some people complained about the noise, but it really isn't that bad. Disc installation went well, installing the drivers, and some applications that came with it.

Now first the connections. I tested both the analog VGA connection and the HDMI connection. VGA is easy. Just plug in the VGA adapter, and connect your VGA cable to your monitor, and it displays okay, just like any other graphic card.

HDMI is a little tricky. I read that many people getting fussed about able to get picture but no sound through HDMI. One thing to note is that, you got to use the supplied DVI-HDMI adapter in order to get picture and sound over to your HDTV. If you just use any DVI-HDMI cable, it will not work. You will simply just get picture and not sound.

Now performance wise, I find it to be more than adequate to handle today's games. I tried Crysis on high settings and ran extremely smoothly. COD 4 ran well too. One thing I agree with the reviews is that, this card gets hot. With the card being stock and not overclocked, temperature was at 78 degrees idle, and 98 degress under load.

You maybe have heard of a "Fan Fix" in the forums, and I suggest you take a look if you would like to lower the temperature of the card. The link is here. It is a nifty and quick fix by varying the fan speed of the card manually. It worked out well for me. Setting at just 35% fan speed up from the standard 20%, I got the following:

Before fix
idle - 78 degrees
load - 98 degrees

After fix
idle - 51 degrees
load - 70 degrees

To sum it all up, it is not a cheap card. It is after all a high end card to begin with. I am very happy with the performance, but the documentation and bundled software needs work. I see myself owning this card for quite a long time before upgrading again.