The Card

With the package out of the way, it's time to move onto the card. Upon pulling it out of the box for the first time, we don't actually see anything we haven't seen before. The card looks identical to the HD 4870 Sonic we looked at from Palit recently which carried with it 512MB of GDDR5.

Like the other Sonic card, the HD 4870 1GB fans are different sizes. The one directly above the core is actually slightly larger than the one that sits towards the back of the card. We can see across the top of the card a heat-pipe that helps move the heat from above the core.

Looking around the card, there isn't anything that really differs from other HD 4870 cards. Towards the back of the card we see two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors while at the front we see a pair of Crossfire connectors.

Moving to the I/O side of things is where the card becomes interesting. We don't see the Dual Link DVI setup that we've become so accustomed to from companies. Alongside a single Dual Link DVI, we see a VGA port along with a HDMI port and Display port. We also have a switch on the back of the card which goes between two sets of clocks. While a bit pointless, it's there none the less.

Specifications

With the card of course carrying the Sonic name, it is overclocked when the switch is in Turbo mode. In Sonic mode, the core comes clocked at 750MHz while the memory comes in at 3800MHz QDR. Kick it up a notch to Turbo and you're running at 775MHz on the core and 4000MHz QDR on the 1GB of GDDR5 memory.