Gainward Radeon HD 4870 1GB Golden Sample

Cooling

While the 4870’s dual slot stock cooler is a whole lot better than the 4850’s copper cooker, it still idles at a toasty 68°C and hits a fiery 82°C at high graphically load – to say there’s room for improvement would be an understatement. Thankfully, the Gainward HD 4870 Golden Sample delivers on this front, with the dual fan, dual slot cooler keeping the card at a pleasant 33°C at idle and then just 59°C at load (all measurements taken in an ambient temperature of 22°C).

What’s even better is that the Gainward 4870’s cooler accomplished these excellent thermal results while also being extremely quiet into the bargain, although the 4870’s stock cooler was admittedly very quiet throughout testing too.

Overclocking

Overclocking the Gainward HD 4870 1GB Golden Sample was actually a very short lived affair, although not for the right reasons. We first tried overclocking the card using the ATI overdrive tool included in the Catalyst driver software, and comfortably hit the maximum possible clock speeds allowed by the software of 790/1,050MHz (790/4,200MHZ effective), representing a five percent core overclock over stock and a whopping sixteen percent overclock on the memory.

Sadly, our overclocking adventures ended here, as none of the overclocking tools available to us were able to effectively adjust the card’s clock speeds – an issue related to an incompatibility between the card’s custom switchable dual BIOS and the various popular overclocking utilities. It’s certainly a shame that we weren’t able to push the card faster, especially considering the superior cooling offered by the dual fan cooler that we were so sure would offer excellent overclocking headroom.

Value and Final Thoughts

Despite delivering both excellent thermal and gameplay performance on the whole, we can’t help but feel that the Gainward HD 4870 1024MB Golden Sample is a little bit of a letdown, especially considering the £30 price premium it carries over the stock HD 4870 1GB. For that extra fifteen percent of investment the in game frame rate returns are generally around the two to three percent mark thanks to the very conservative core overclock, which is pretty disappointing.

In those games that are able to utilise the more aggressive memory overclock, like Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty: World at War, you will see a reasonable performance increase of close to ten percent, but sadly such applications are fairly limited, and thus so is the performance advantage offered by this card.

Making the situation even more complicated is the recent announcement by Nvidia that the 216 core version of the GeForce GTX 260 has received a hefty price drop to just around £210 and firmly into the territory of the HD 4870 1GB. While we’ll reserve judgement on the price drop until more retailers get onboard and availability improves, it certainly goes a long way towards complicating things even more in the high end graphics market.

But even discounting the green competition, there really isn’t a lot to recommend this card ahead of a stock HD 4870 1GB which can be had for a good £30 less. The performance improvement offered by the Gainward HD 4870 1GB Golden Sample really doesn’t come close to justifying the extra outlay, and the limited bundle and chronic lack of overclocking headroom don’t help either.

While we love the old school Turbo switch it just ends up feeling redundant and in the case of the dual BIOS, causes more problems than it would ever solve and while it's by no means a bad card, especially when you consider the performance in comparison to the wider graphics market, the Gainward Radeon HD 4870 1GB Golden Sample is simply too expensive to strongly recommend.

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Score Guide