Monday, August 18th 2008
Gainward Non-reference Radeon HD 4870 Fresh out
Gainward, a subsidiary of Palit Microsystems presented a set of pictures of its non-reference HD 4870. It will share this design with the Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic. Gainward sought aggressive cooling and overclocking for this card. The card will continue to feature 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. This card features dual-BIOS, a BIOS maintains 750 MHz / 950 MHz core and memory parameters, while a second high-performance BIOS ups these frequencies to 775 MHz / 1000MHz. Presumably this mechanism brings about redundancy with the BIOS, a boon for overclockers as accidental damage to the card due to tweaking the BIOS could be easily resolved.As you can see from the first picture, the card features a DisplayPort on the card apart from two DVI connectors, there is no air-outlet on the bracket-plate. The second picture shows the cooler, it features two fans of dissimilar sizes. An 80 mm fan blows air over the GPU / memory area while a smaller 70 mm fan blows air directly over the VRM area. Under the hood of this cooler is the cooler which consists of a GPU-block from which three aluminum heatpipes project. These pipes convey heat through the fins on which the fans blow air.On to the electronics of this card, you can see a non-reference PCB, the two 6-pin PCI-E power inputs are angled and pushed on to the side (a-là Radeon HD 2900 XT) unlike the reference PCB. The PCB fuels the card with 4 phases for the GPU and 2 phases for the memory. Speaking of memory, the card uses GDDR5 chips made by Qimonda.
Source:
Expreview
27 Comments on Gainward Non-reference Radeon HD 4870 Fresh out
very nice indeed.
Looks like a really good card though :D
2x DVI + HDMI is a good output set - and aluminium fins or not, 70mm+80mm will keep those temps down.
Six phase.... mem phases on left, 4 VGPU on right. Awesome.
Gainward are clearly showing their new love for AMD.
This card uses DisplayPort and there's a pic of the cooler without the hood/fans The memory chips look bare :eek::
^See that switch? When the system is powered-off, you can use the switch make the card boot from another BIOS. So the card holds a backup BIOS, if you wish, or an OC'ed and a stock BIOS.
But a cool card, though, long as the price isn't too high.