HD4870 512MB - MSI R4870 and R4870 OC review

The last two years were extremely rough for AMD. The company began trailing a lot behind Intel with their brilliant Core 2 processor, and if that wasn't enough, upon acquiring ATI, things didn't work out with video cards either. When at the end of 2006 NVIDIA came with its G80 core and the DirectX 10 videocards based on it, AMD had nothing, and the released six month later 2900 series cards were performing similarly to 8800GTX. The end of 2007 gave AMD a bit of breather thanks to HD3850 and HD3870, but even then NVIDIA managed to shine with its new G92 core and the 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB cards based on it. But enough of the past, there are two more, new cores from AMD and NVIDIA. Now let's see how do they fare compared to each other.

The release of the newest generation of video cards of NVIDIA (GeForce 200, based on the GT200 core) and AMD (HD4800, based on Radeon R700) happened in ModReactor's... "blind spot". Were are about to redeem ourselves for that unfortunate occurrence, by presenting you with series of reviews for the different models of the latest cards from the video card industry leaders. The first one is of the referent MSI R4870 (R4870-T2D512) and another, non-referent MSI R4870 OC (R4870-T2D512-OC).

There isn't much to be said about R4870-T2D512 (the MSI, based on HD4870). The card is completely referent - as recommended from AMD. Same goes for the core and memory frequencies. The following table will aid you in keeping track of the model specifications. Now the more interesting card is the MSI R4870-T2D512-OC, that comes with factory raised frequencies but that's all about it - same PCB design, same cooler, same everything else :)