Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB DHT review - 1 - I feel a freeze coming up ...

Hello all and welcome yet another Radeon HD 4870 review. Man, these puppies are popular ever since the day they were introduced. They sell like candy and surely they should do so, as it's a product series offering really great value for money. We are now a good three months away from it's original release and we notice that a lot of ATI's board partners are making a move towards a customized model. Well, cooler to be specifically.

See, the reference product does get quite hot and AIBs figured, we need to deal with that. So did the recently introduced company Force3D. They are up and coming, and working hard on product differentiation. Along that line they introduce a Radeon HD 4870 512MB model with DHT cooler.

To be more specific, the cooling method is called 'Freezer DHT' and should allow for clock speeds up to 800 MHz according to Force3D. Now that's a very bold claim to make for any manufacturer, so rest assured we'll try that and see if the claim is valid.

DHT stands for Direct Touch Heatpipe and should cool a nice 33% better than the reference coolers from ATI. The DHT (Direct Touch Heatpipe) adapts new technology in which the heatpipe has contact with the GPU directly. The heatpipe absorbs heat from the GPU, cooling performance should really be excellent. Well, we'll see .. I surely love to find out.

Today we do the regular in-depth review again, covering technology, specs, heat, temperatures, power consumption, overclocking. And if that's not enough we'll top it off with a dozen in-game benchmarks with some of the hottest game titles around. In short, welcome to this Guru3D.com review.