HIS Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire Video Card Review – GDDR5 Arrives

A Closer Look at the Radeon HD 4870

Here are our pair of cards laying opposite directions so you can get a feel for the layout of the Radeon HD 4870 series. HIS used the reference design from ATI, so the PCB and heat sink should be good to go. Notice the Radeon HD 4870 is a dual-slot card, so hopefully it will cool better than the Radeon HD 4850.

You’ll notice that the HIS Radeon HD 4870 has a pair of 6-pin PCI Express power connectors on the board and that is because it uses 160 Watts of power during peak usage! The box of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 states that a 500W or greater power supply with a 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connector is recommended for use. If you want to run these cards in CrossFire you’ll need at least a 600W power supply and four 6-pin connectors. Both connectors must be used for proper operation, so if you only have one PCI Express 6-pin adapter ou need to upgrade power supplies or buy an adapter.

The HIS Radeon HD 4870 comes with two dual-link DVI outputs and an HDTV output. The Radeon HD 3870 has HDMI output support through the DVI-to-HDMI adapters included.

As previously mentioned the board supports CrossFireX for those that want more power for graphics or other applications that take advantage of more than one GPU. Pictured above are the pair of CrossFire interconnects, which only one needs to be used for CrossFire and both used if running 3-way CrossFireX.