ASUS EAH4870 TOP Radeon HD 4870

Monday, October 06, 2008 - by Shane Unrein in Graphics/Sound
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Although the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 were launched nearly four months ago, they are both still exciting cards and we look forward to testing each one that enters our labs. For this article, we have another "TOP" card from ASUS in the form of the EAH4870 TOP, which of course is a factory overclocked Radeon HD 4870.

Like most other HD 4870s on store shelves, the EAH4870 TOP sports 512MB of GDDR5 memory and a 256-bit memory bus. Additionally, the card features support for DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, and CrossFireX multi-GPU technology. What differentiates the EAH4870 TOP from most other 4870s is its factory overclock: the core clock pushes pixels at 815 MHz (ATI's reference spec is 750 MHz) while the memory is set to 925 MHz (ATI reference is 900 MHz).

That is a decent overclock, especially for the core, and we were excited to see how this card would perform compared to a reference Radeon HD 4870, Radeon HD 4850, GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce 9800 GTX. Before we get into the results of our testing, let's take a closer look at the Radeon HD 4800 Series specifications and features and then take a tour of the EAH4870 TOP.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
Specifications and Features

  • 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
  • PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
  • 256-bit GDDR3/GDDR5 memory interface

  • Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support

    • Shader Model 4.1
    • 32-bit floating point texture filtering
    • Indexed cube map arrays
    • Independent blend modes per render target
    • Pixel coverage sample masking
    • Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
    • Gather4 texture fetching

  • Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

    • 800 stream processing units

      • Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
      • Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
      • Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
    • 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
    • Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
    • Shader instruction and constant caches
    • Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
    • Up to 128 textures per pixel
    • Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
    • DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
    • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
    • Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
    • Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
    • Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
    • Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
    • Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
    • 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
    • Physics processing support

  • Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

    • High performance vertex cache
    • Programmable tessellation unit
    • Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
    • Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

  • Anti-aliasing features

    • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4 or 8 samples per pixel)
    • Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
    • Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
    • Gamma correct
    • Super AA (ATI CrossFireX configurations only)
    • All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

  • Texture filtering features

    • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
    • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
    • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
    • Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
    • Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
    • Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
  • OpenGL 2.0 support
    •

  • ATI PowerPlay

    • Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings

    • Performance-on-Demand

      • Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
      • Clock and memory speed throttling
      • Voltage switching
      • Dynamic clock gating
    • Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
    		•

  • ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform

    • 2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2)

      • Enabling hardware decode acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
      • Dual stream playback (or Picture-in-picture)

    • Hardware MPEG-1, and DivX video decode acceleration

      • Motion compensation and IDCT

    • ATI Avivo Video Post Processor

      • New enhanced DVD upconversion to HD new!
      • New automatic and dynamic contrast adjustment new!
      • Color space conversion
      • Chroma subsampling format conversion
      • Horizontal and vertical scaling
      • Gamma correction
      • Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
      • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
      • Detail enhancement
      • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
      • Bad edit correction
      • Full score in HQV (SD) and HQV (HD) video quality benchmarks

    • Two independent display controllers

      • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
      • Full 30-bit display processing
      • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
      • Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
      • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
      • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
      • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
      • Hardware cursor

    • Two integrated DVI display outputs

      • Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)
      • Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)
      • Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content4

    • Two integrated 400MHz 30-bit RAMDACs

      • Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363

    • DisplayPort output support

      • Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16003

    • HDMI output support

      • Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
      • Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution

    • Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder

      • Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
      • Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
      • Underscan and overscan compensation
      • MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
      • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
      • VGA mode support on all display outputs

    • ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology

      • Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs
      • Integrated compositing engine
      • High performance dual channel bridge interconnect

     

    • ASUS packs the EAH4870 TOP in a simple yet nicely designed orange and black box that features a female warrior on the right side. ASUS's warrior choice is interesting to say the least, and she actually shows up again on the cooler. When we opened up the main, external box, we were pleasantly surprised by the black boxes that greeted us. Each black box has a gold ASUS logo stamped on it. Ultimately it is of course irrelevant if the card doesn't perform well (and even if it does), but this is easily one of the best video card packaging presentations we've seen in a long time.


    The bundle included with the EAH4870 TOP, however, is more practical than exciting. ASUS throws in a quick setup installation guide, a CrossFire connector, an ASUS utility CD, a VGA driver CD, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, an HDTV-out cable, a PCI Express power cable, and an ASUS-branded leather mouse pad.

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