Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB DHT review - 14 - Final Words

The Verdict

Force3D delivers an impressive product with the Radeon HD 4870 512 MB DHT. It's a very lovely product in terms of performance and yes, we are able to overclock the card to pretty impressive numbers, adding more value for money to the product.

It unfortunately isn't all glory though. Though we can not deny that the cooler does a pretty good job keeping the GPU cool, even when overclocked there remains a concern. It's the actual noise level coming from that cooler. We measured it at 45 DBA and that's 75-90 cm (slightly less than 3 foot) away from the chassis. The DHT cooler was continuously there noise wise and for the audiophiles definitely something of a bother. Please be aware of this as it is not a cooler to go with if you are into silent operation of your PC.

What surprised me was the dazzling overclock we were able to achieve, literally in seconds we got it up and running with a 830 MHz Core frequency. Even more surprising was the memory overclock at 1216 MHz. Since this is GDDR5 memory that boils down to an effective sustained memory frequency of 4864 MHz. And you and me both know it, the RV770 GPU on this card just loves more bandwidth for it's framebuffer. Our end results (previous page) for overclocking therefore were showing a very impressive increase of the overall gaming framerate, so you can gain another 10-15% additional performance out of the product.

It surprises me that Force3D does not overclock these products as standard, as then they would sell like hot buns from the oven. So other than the noise factor, this really is a lovely product. The bundle could be a notch better, but the cooler and overclock compensates for that.

It's a Radeon HD 4870, you'll really love the performance as it is a fierce and competitive product with loads of features and options. We play games like Mass Effect at 2560x1600 with the very best image quality settings at an average frame rate of 49 frames per second. That's golden.

So the golden trick with the DHT is is really it's tweak ability. Combine that with one of the best selling GPU based graphics cards of the moment... and how can one lose?

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