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PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 - Faster Yet Cooler?

By Kenny Yeo - 8 Sep 2008

Test Setup

Test Setup

We'll be putting the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 through its paces using the same Windows XP and Vista setups we've been using for our last few reviews, and they are as follows:

Windows XP SP2 Test System

  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz)
  • Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' motherboard
  • 2 x 1GB DDR2-800 Kingston HyperX memory in dual channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.7 80GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c

Windows Vista SP1 Test System

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.00GHz)
  • Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 motherboard
  • 2 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Aeneon memory in dual channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

We'll be paying close attention to see how much performance gain the higher clock speeds and extra memory will give the PowerColor over a standard HD 4870, and also how it'll stack up against the latest GTX 200 cards from NVIDIA. Here's the complete list of cards and the drivers used for both test setups:

  • ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB (Catalyst 8.6)
  • ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB (Catalyst 8.6)
  • ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB (CrossFireX) (Catalyst 8.6)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB (ForceWare 177.34)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 896MB (ForceWare 177.34)

The following benchmarks were tested using their built-in time demo or benchmarking tools:

For Windows XP:

  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
  • Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
  • F.E.A.R (ver 1.0)
  • Crysis (ver 1.1)
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)

For Windows Vista:

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage (ver 101)
  • Crysis (ver 1.21)
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