Final thoughts and rating
Force3D has gone about launching a special-edition Radeon HD 4870 in a well-thought-out manner. The company has tied up with Arctic Cooling and used a Accelero TWIN TURBO heatsink to cool the hot-running Radeon HD 4870 GPU residing underneath. However, such is the design that it doesn't concurrent cool the memory chips, as well.Appreciating the performance and aural benefits of using a heatsink that's comfortably better than the dual-slot that ships with the majority of cards, Force3D is able to push core/shader/memory clocks up a touch, which translates into performance that up to five per cent better than a reference card's.
Priced at just under £200, which is around £25 more than the cheapest bog-standard cards, we reckon that it makes sense for those who want a quiet-sounding solution that has room for extra frequency headroom.
The non-reference Radeon HD 4870 market continues to be interesting, and Force3D's effort is worthy of attention because it ships with a number of features not present in the reference design.
The good
Pre-overclocked
Quiet cooler
Frequency headroom
The not so good
Card can take up to three expansion slots on some motherboards
PowerColor offers a pre-overclocked Radeon HD 4870 with a 1GB framebuffer for similar money
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS scores products out of a possible 10. A score for an average-rated product, therefore, is a meaningful ‘5’, and not ‘9/10’, which is common practice for a great many other publications.
We consider any product score above '5' as a safe buy. The
higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy.
Simple, straightforward buying advice.
Force3D Radeon HD 4870 Black Edition 512MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Force3D Radeon HD 4870 Black Edition 512MB can be purchased for £196.30.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any Force3D representatives choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
