Introduction

AMD's HD 4870 has been on the market for a while now and is soon to be succeeded by the HD 4890. Nevertheless the card is still a great performance choice, especially since many manufacturers are also offering 1 GB versions of the card. The reference design featured 512 MB of GDDR5 at launch.
HIS has couple a custom colored AMD reference PCB with their own IceQ cooling solution and an extra overclock of 770 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory.

Packaging & Contents

The dominating colors on the HIS HD 4870 package are black and blue. A large "Turbo" sticker lets potential users know that this is the overclocked version. Another sticker indicates that this card comes with the Stalker Clear Sky full game, which is a time limited promotion.



You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation + Driver CD + Stalker Clear Sky full game
• PCI-E Power Cable
• CrossFire bridge
• HDMI and DVI adapter
• HIS Power Up sticker

The Card

Just like the AMD HD 4870 reference design, the cooler occupies two slots in your system and blows hot air out of the case.


The card has two DVI outputs which is the standard configuration today. Should you need an analog VGA output you can use the included DVI adapter. To connect your big TV screen you can use the HDMI adapter (also included). For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable (also included). AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.


This card can be paired with any other HD 4870 card for improved performance in CrossFire. Please note that when you combine a 512 MB and a 1 GB card, the 1 GB card will disable half of its memory to match the second card.



Here are the front and the back of the cards, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

The cooler uses a copper base that is connected to a large heatsink via heatpipes.


The card has two six-pin power connectors, both are required for operation of the card.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry the model number IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X. With a latency of 1.0 ns, they are specified to run at 1000 MHz. Compared to traditional GDDR3 memory, GDDR5 doubles the effective bandwidth resulting in greatly improved memory performance.


HIS has chosen to use the AMD reference design, which means the board comes with the well-known Volterra VT1165MF voltage regulator which allows software voltage control.


Here you can see the graphics processing unit. AMD's RV770 is made in a 55 nm process with 956 million transistors.