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.

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.

Before we get into the appearance of the card, we should point out that ASUS informed us recently that the cooler (which is a reference ATI cooler) on our sample is not the cooler that ASUS plans to use for EAH4870 TOP cards that it will sell in the United States. Instead, ASUS plans to swap it out for a better cooler that will provide lower temperatures and possibly better overclocking, but the factory overclock will remain the same.

As we just mentioned, our sample came with the reference cooler attached to the board. You can probably tell that there isn't really any change from the reference HD 4870 at all, other than the sticker that covers the cooler (which is a cool cherry blossom + female warrior combination). She definitely makes us want to frag.

As you might expect, the size of this card immediately apparent. It takes up two slots and is pretty long (about as long as a standard ATX motherboard is wide). It features a red PCB and a red fan in the translucent, red plastic cooler. Overall, the cooler does an adequate job and doesn't get too noisy (except during boot/POST).

We were happy to see that the bracket is vented, which will allow hot air to leave your system. In the second picture above, you can see the two CrossFireX connectors. These connectors are required for those of you wanting to rock some multi-GPU goodness.

Like other flagship cards from both NVIDIA and ATI, the EAH4870 TOP boasts two DVI connectors. In addition, there are two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors.

HotHardware's Test System Intel Core 2 Duo Powered

Let's start our examination of the EAH4870 TOP's performance by looking at the test results from Futuremark's latest 3D test suite, 3DMark Vantage. This benchmark does a good job of setting the tone of the relative performance of all the cards we are comparing in this article.
 

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Vantage

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's "Performance" preset option, which uses a resolution of 1280x1024.

Right out of the gates, the EAH4870 TOP shows that it's quite the contender. It beats all of the other cards we tested without breaking a sweat. We are glad to see the EAH4870 TOP leave the Radeon HD 4850 in the dust since the EAH4870 TOP costs at least $100 more.

Company of Heroes DirectX 10 Gaming Performance

Company of Heroes

Relic Entertainment's World War II era real-time strategy game Company of Heroes was originally released as a DirectX 9 title for Windows, but recent upates to the game have incorporated support for new DirectX 10 features that improve image quality and enhance the game's finer graphical details. The game features a built-in performance test, which which we used to attain the results below. Our Company of Heroes tests were run at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with anti-aliasing disabled or 4x anti-aliasing enabled, and all of the game's image-quality related options were set to high.

While the EAH4870 TOP may have strutted its stuff in 3DMark Vantage, it stumbles a bit in this DX10 test. The GeForce GTX 260 just can't be touched here by the rest of the pack, including the EAH4870 TOP.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars OpenGL Gaming Performance

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is based on id's radically enhanced Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some. In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two. ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs extremely large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many small textures. The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory. Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high-end graphics cards vigorously. The game was tested with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with soft particles enabled in addition to 8x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

We tried to make this test more challenging to our test group by increasing the AA and AF levels, but that still didn't result in much differentiation in performance. All of the scores are pretty close together, with the GeForce GTX 260 beating out the EAH4870 TOP by around 5 FPS.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 DirectX Gaming Performance

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapon and level design, Half-Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 offers a number of visual enhancements, including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well. We used a custom recorded timedemo file to benchmark all cards in this test.

In our Half-Life 2 test, the EAH4870 TOP performs almost identically to the GeForce GTX 260. This is closer to what we expected to see during our testing. Additionally, it's nice to see the EAH4870 TOP outperform the HD 4850 by 20 FPS at 1600x1200 with 4x AA, 8x AF and HDR enabled.

Crysis DirectX 9 and 10 Gaming Performance

Crysis

If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player, FPS smash-hit Crysis should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine visuals are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the computer screen to date. The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering, like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet. In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is HOT. We ran the full game patched to v1.21 with all of the game's visual options set to 'High' to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested.

While the EAH4870 TOP falls behind the GeForce GTX 260 in the DirectX 9 test, it turns the table in the DirectX 10 test. The battle between the Radeon HD 4870 and the GeForce GTX 260 is definitely an interesting one.

Overclocking the ASUS EAH4870 TOP Going beyond the stock settings...

We used ATI's Overdrive utility in the Catalyst Control Center to overclock the already overclocked EAH4870 TOP. We usually recommend that users just stick with the factory overclocks, but that didn't stop us from seeing what we could squeeze out of this card.

After the usual trial and error process, we hit a ceiling at 850 MHz for the core and 960 MHz for the memory. Recall that the factory overclocks are 815 MHz and 925 MHz, respectively, while the ATI reference clocks are 750 MHz and 900 MHz, respectively. The 100 MHz boost over the reference core speed is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, not all of the games we tested benefitted from the overclock, but you can see some of the test results at the new speeds above.

Performance Summary: The ASUS EAH4870 TOP performed as we expected it to for the most part. It, of course, offers a nice bit of extra performance over a Radeon HD 4870 with reference clocks while performing significantly better than a Radeon HD 4850, especially when the resolution and eye candy are cranked up. Furthermore, the EAH4870 TOP trades victories back and forth with our reference GeForce GTX 260.

ASUS's "TOP" line of video cards never fail to excite. As performance enthusiasts, we certainly appreciate the significant factory overclocks (as long as stability isn't sacrificed, of course). ASUS consistently delivers excellent products, and the EAH4870 TOP is no exception. As we noted several pages back, however, ASUS plans to ship this card with a different cooler in the United States, and it sounds like the planned cooler should only make for a better card. We look forward to seeing what ASUS comes up with and will update our readers as soon as we have more details.

The lack of availability of the EAH4780 TOP from online stores confirms that ASUS is delaying its release to market as it finalizes the custom cooler. For now, if you really want an EAH4870 TOP, you'll have to keep an eye on your favorite e-tailer's stock or ASUS's web site for updates. If the EAH4870 TOP hits the streets at a price that isn't too much more than other HD 4870s, then we would wholeheartedly recommend that you consider it if you are on the hunt for a high-end video card that costs around $300.
 

Great performance Factory overclock HDMI 1.3 output (built-in multi-channel 7.1 surround audio over DVI-HDMI adapter) DirectX 10.1 support CrossFireX support	Dual-slot card Questionable availability