Home  Reviews HD4870 512MB - MSI R4870 and R4870 OC review
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HD4870 512MB - MSI R4870 and R4870 OC review |
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Written by Dimitar Dinchev a.k.a. Veseliq
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Monday, 03 November 2008 |
Page 3 of 13
Page 3 - "Naked" pictures of MSI R4870
Removing the cooler of HD4870 was rather easy. As standard for AMD cards, the body of the cooler is kept in place with about 10 small screws through the card, and the copper radiator itself is pressed to the core with the aid of additional 4 screws, square tension plate and small springs.
Upon removing the cooler we get to have a closer look at the card. The cooler consists of copper base and 2 heatpipes, passing through aluminum plates. The massive and heavy construction is serviced by turbine fan. The memory transfers its heat to the copper through silicone thermal pads. Its "L" placed chips are QIMONDA GDDR5 and as we already said, they work at 900MHz (3600MHz effectiveи), providing data transfer up to 115GB/s.
So here is the first view at the RV770. The core had changed since RV670, the AMD Radeon HD3870 core - the top of the single core models of the previous AMD video card generation. The chip is again 55nm based, it again uses 256-bit bus to the memory and 16 rasterizing units (ROPs), but for starters RV770 has inside itself 150% more scalar processors (800, compared to the 320 in RV670), grouped in 10 SIMD cores, as well as 40 texturizing units (only 16 in RV670). Nothing to be said about its DirectX 10.1 and PCI-E 2.0 capabilities, since they were available with RV670 too. RV770 has 956 million transistors and size of 260mm^2. The older RV670 had only 666 million transistors and size of 192mm^2, while NVIDIA GT200 is with 412 mm^2 and contains 1400 million transistors.
There is bunch of multimedia capabilities implemented in RV770 too. The core has UVD 2 (Unified video decoder), that allows hardware MPEG-2, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 decoding. But that's not all, the technology allows simultaneous decoding of two video streams and picture-in-picture (PIP) mode. There are other interesting perks too, for example - the chip is capable of providing 7.1 channel sound output through HDMI and so on. Intriguing, yes, though not concerning this review.
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