Customer Reviews

Sapphire Radeon HD4870 X2 2GB DDR5 Dual DVI/TVO PCI-Express Graphics Card

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is mind-blowing performance, folks...it chews up every game you throw at it, and was the only card that let me play Crysis at the detail settings that I wanted to. Held out from playing until now...and man, was I glad that I did.

Anti-aliasing comes almost free of any performance hit, and resolutions/quality settings previously considered ridiculously intensive for gaming are suddenly not that extravagant anymore. CFAA, especially Edge-Detect AA, deserves mention, as it is ATi's custom AA mode that kicks in at the shader level, and can thus be applied to almost any game.
COD 4 at 24x CFAA is indeed a sight to behold, and can be played with buttery smoothness.

The downsides to this card? First of all, it's comes at a price premium due to it's market leading performance. Secondly, 2 GPUs on one card can produce a lot of heat...you will need a case with good airflow, and plenty of room to install as well.

Lastly before buying, a PSU of at least 600W is required...BARE MINIMUM. Recommended PSU should be between 700W - 800W for a fully loaded system.

Happy gaming! :)

I purchased the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870x2 about a month and a half ago. The card is a full length card. If you have a small mid-tower it might not fit in your case. Also make sure that you have a good power supply. This card requires two power connections. In addition, make sure that you case is properly ventilated (my case temperature hovers around 26c idle and 31c). However, once the requirements above are met get ready for some serious eye-candies.

There is nothing you can throw at it that it will not handle. By the way, I have a 24" monitor and I run everything at 1920x1200 resolution. Blu-ray movies look incredible. I do not have the words to describe how beautiful the images are. A lot of people get caught up by the number of frame per second (fps)to purchase graphic cards. Remember that movies are shown at 24fps, so any card that can provide 24fps on an application or game will look extremely good. Why spend that much money on a graphic card? Peace of mind. For the next 2 to 3 years, if not more, I will not have to worry about not being able to run any game or application that come to the market, and in a couple of years, when the price of this particular card hits its lowest possible level, I will throw in a second one in a crossfire arrangement for a more powerful graphic sub-system.

I remove a star for the price.

made. I will not comment on the performance as others have done that.

Other:
Pro's - Well . . . extremely high performance and easily configurable through the Catalyst Utility with many options. All the options you could want.
Con's - Extremely long. Carefully pick your box. I installed it in the Thermaltake Spedo Advance Package VI9001W2Z Full Tower Gaming Case with Max Airflow and See Through Window (Black)I purchased from amazon.com which has a huge interior (I highly recommend this box) and it barely fit lengthwise. It runs extremely hot . .. . so hot in fact that the heat conducted through the PCI-e 2.0 slot on to my motherboard and increased the MoBo heat to a level I previously had not seen in a MoBo . . . not dangerous but noticeable. To keep the heat down, the fan has to be set at a noisy level. The heat coming from the exhaust port in back will heat your room. I strongly suggest using water cooling on this baby. The Thermaltake Spedo I mentioned has two eight inch fans and 3 five inch with two others possible; and it is already set up with holes in the case for a water cooling system. Do not use the drivers that come with the card. Later drivers are available so you will have to uninstall them and the Catalyst Control Center will get screwed up and mess your drivers up when you try and install the newer drivers. Tech support tried to be helpful but couldn't figure it out. When I shipped my box to Sun City, this card ripped out of the PCI-e slot and ruined my MoBo, so now I am building a new computer and choose to use the XFX HD489AZDEC Radeon HD 4890 XT 1.0 GB DDR5 PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card sold by amazon.com of course. There is no complaint of noise from this card and it is Crossfire so if I need more power I can add another one.

Would I have been happy with this card . . . I think so although there are driver issues reported (will ATI be able to solve them or will they give up like NVidea did with the beeping nvata.sys driver fiasco on the NForce 4 chipset drivers). Will I be more satisfied with the XFX HD489AZDEC Radeon HD 4890 XT 1.0 GB DDR5 PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card? I'll edit this post latter and tell you if I am.

BTW, for you real maniacs out there, this is a Crossfire card, so make sure your MoBo supports it if you are loony enough to want two of these in your box. Pick your MoBo carefully though, as you may take a bandwidth hit in the second PCI-e 2.0 socket. A card like this needs and deserves the best MoBo money can buy.

I have had other AIT cards, 2x 3870x2 and HD2600 XT, and this card should rock. However, with my ASUS P6T MOBO, X58 chipset, this card will only run games in non-crossfire mode. I researched this subject on the internet and support sites for several hours, including ATI forums. The ATI Sr. people were worthless. I found that this was a common theme for this card. It seems there is a an compatibility issue that people are hoping will be resolved with the video drivers. When ATI is enabled, internal crossfire is enabled and many of my games will not run. If I disable ATI fo rthe card settings, only one GPU works and the games will run. What is the point of having a beast of a video card running at half power, until ATI acknowledges the problem and fixes it. I returned it and purchased 2x GTX280 and they worked right out of the box. Yes they are more expensive, but I am making a point that my time is more valuable and I should not have to turn to forms for help.

hello this card blows away a gtx 480 like nothing not much today can beat it still,there is better gpu but if u dont get 50 percent upgrade not worth buying an only a very few gpu do it,1 gtx 580 but not by much or the 6990 4 gb beats it gtx 570,but any lower cards dont buy them cause one 4870x2 smokes them by far just look at benchmarks tells an shows the truth,but this card new is only 159 on comp.usa free shipping

Its truly a great card ,with pots of features and blazing fast speed than even some of the costliest NVIDIA cards .Only issue with this card is needs a high PSU SMPS (min 600W) and runs very hot even at idle except that even some of the newest (2011) NVIDIA cards are still no match to it .You certainly need a good ventilated chassis with additional cooling fans installed .In case of hot humid countries you certainly need the room to have cooling system else the core temperatures reach way above 60 -70 Celsius at full load .Also I have found some flickering in some games probably due to some driver bugs and hangs in case of overclocking.

IT GAVE NVIDIA A RUN FOR IT'S MONEY, TOO BAD IT'S NOW OLD AND OBSOLETE, STILL I HAD GOOD RUN WITH IT FOR MORE THAN A YEAR.

I've been using my card for over a year now, and it still does better than the rest. It can certainly handle anything WoW throws out, so go ahead and increase particle densities and whatever, you're good to go. Sadly, it doesn't look like this card is being made anymore, but I'm sure Sapphire has something even better now. Oh well, was just thinking about pairing my current 4870x2 with another one since two come really close to doubling frame rates, which apparently isn't as common in most cards as one would think.

The only problem I've had wasn't with the card itself, but with an issue with, after a long while of trying to figure it out, the catalyst control center. Luckily, you don't need the CCC so once it was uninstalled, no more crashes. I also tried a demo of ARMA II that seemed to strain the card on higher settings, but that's the only game I've come across to do that. Though, I'm not really sure why it does, it might very well be some other issue, like their demo server. Not sure.

Anyway, it's a great card, it's still modern enough to handle any game made today and probably for another couple of years at least.

I installed this card on my Vista machine and now it is on my Windows 7 machine. I run all my games at max settings with no problems. I currently get 55-65 FPS on Dragon Age Origins with settings maxed by the Catalyst Control Center. I have had this card for eight months and it is still running new games very well.

Pros: The HD4870 x2 is the fastest graphics card on the market today, and that isn't just my opinion. Tomorrow -- who knows? The particular graphics card I purchased was made by Saphire Tech. With two GPUs on board, this is like two cards in one. Take a look at the 3DMark6 and 3DVantage scores for this card, and you will notice that no other graphics card beats it. Although it is expensive, I got a great deal from Amazon because one of their partner companies failed to live up to their offer, and Amazon stepped in and sold the card to me for the same low price(relatively speaking, of course.)

Cons: This card isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for (as my son always says.) Also, it runs a bit hot when stressed with temperatures approaching 100 C, but so far this hasn't caused any problems, because most of the time the card isn't maxed out.