Read The Review here _____________________ Due to their levels of excellence XFX have received more DriverHeaven gold awards in the last few years than any other company which is quite an achievement. Not content with being known for great Nvidia based products XFX recently announced a range of Radeon graphics cards and Intel motherboards, all of which are designed to take on the best products in their marketplace. Today we have the first of their cards on our test bench, the Radeon HD 4870 1 GB XXX which is a factory overclocked model.
good performer. Love the colours and the red dvi out ports. Good start, now I hope to see the same cards with better coolers !
Great review . Thanks DH , XFX is awesome , Hope to see more companies joins the red team (i.e Zotac).
Great review Is it me or does the mask look like Jason from the Friday the 13th Movies....XFX Slaughters the competition ..... PS The XFX Theme ROCKS !!! Any desktop themes planed?
I bought one of these yesterday (Newegg was offering $30 off), but I was in a hurry. Now I go and check some of the "reviews" and there is supposed to be a problem with "Flickering" that requires a BIOS flash... Has anyone (besides the reviewers on Newegg...) encountered this issue?
Well I didn't notice flickering till I started up a game. It was there and was a problem. Had to download a BIOS update for the card. At first I didn't run the flash utility with Admin privileges so it failed to work. After the update it seems to outperform 2 Palit 8800 GTs / overclocked and with 1GB of memory each. So I'm really pleased with my purchase.
Cool on the feedback and glad its working well for you I still want to pick up another 4870 512 DDR5 I have 2 X38 CrossfireX mobos here and haven't had a change to try Crossfire yet ...
There is only one thing I wish the ATI cards had: Physics Processing. Now I'll admit if they had it, the way it was implemented would be different from Nvidia's method. And Game companies would not want to support both in all cases. Add to this the fact that these cards are so powerful maybe Physics is something we can do without...? BTW I also have an X38 chipset board, the Asus P5E. It's in another system and I've had numerous issues in the past with memory voltages on that board. So I wasn't even going to try Crossfire, and the P45 board seems to work better.
On PhysX I hope to try out Mirror's Edge this weekend just been to darn busy. Now that the AMD system is setup and stable I am going to try an experiment this weekend. Using XP SP3 on this system I am going to try running the 4870 alone and then it along with the 9600gt for dedicated physx. (If I can do it) On this P5E3 Deluxe no memory voltage issues so far. I did however have major memory issues with the GA-X38-DQ6 until I flashed the BIOS.
ATI has Physics processing? What rock have I been under....? Is there anything special I need to download?
Well now, after just a few short months, I really regret buying this card! See I installed the 9.2 drivers, and skipped the 9.3 set. And when I installed the 9.4 set it no longer wanted to let my dual display setup work. I've been putting up with it and was hoping the 9.5s would be better. Now I realize it's a "No Go" - I contacted ATI's Tech Support. They had me uninstall the drivers, run Driver Sweeper, then reinstall the 9.5s. No change to the Dual Display malfunction... What happens is that it disables the secondary display when Windows starts. This means that every time I need to restart this system I have to open the CCC, enable the second display in "clone mode", and confirm the setting change. Then I have to open CCC again (yes, it closes down automatically after confirming the last setting change!), then I have to "Extend my Desktop" onto the second display. And, since installing the 9.5s, to add insult to injury ... almost every time I try to start the CCC I get an error message about the CCC Command line interface not working. So sometimes I can bring up the CCC and most other times I can't! End Result! I've had enough of ATI for a long while, and I don't ever want to talk to their Tech Support people again. :annoyed: And this situation is really sad! In the past I was always favorably impressed with their drivers. Now all I can hope for is that enough of you will keep buying ATI cards... so Nvidia doesn't think they can jack their prices up to astonomical levels. Cause even the BEST Hardware, without good drivers, is nothing more than an expensive paper weight.
