4870's derivitive comparison:- price/noise/temp/oc ability

[0nket]

Second post so firstly big hello's and morning to everyone on the Hexus forums!
right, now down to buisness
I'm looking to get myself a 4870, ive come here to ask you lot as apparently your collective knowledge on such subjects is renowned for it's nit pickingly obssesive wheat n chaff seperating abilities..
ive searched the net for an 'all in one' detailed comparison of each of the type's availiable of this card and there doesn't seem to be one..
i'm personly looking for a cheap as possible 1gig version that runs quite n cool enough for a healthyish overclock without the need for fitting fans and heatsink's thus voiding warranty.
Others maybe looking for the 512mb version so it'd be usefull to compare these too.
thanks for your time people

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

One of these Powercolor cards will do the job:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s....html?POW-4870

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s...html?POW-48701

Reviews:

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/video/rv770-4-p1.html

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Powe...870-1GB-GDDR5/

[Will404]

Would you not void the warrenty overclocking it anyway. Even if you never replace the fan (though I don't suppose they kno9w that)

[0nket]

i know not of the specifics of the warranty but i've read somewhere before that ati's official Catalyst software allows the control of different variables of things.
Surely by restricting oneselves to the constraints of official software you cant fnuck the warranty up!?

[scaryjim]

i know not of the specifics of the warranty but i've read somewhere before that ati's official Catalyst software allows the control of different variables of things.
Surely by restricting oneselves to the constraints of official software you cant fnuck the warranty up!?

Don't just assume that - read your terms and conditions carefully. I'm pretty sure that some manufacturers will void your warrant if you step 1Hz over default clocks, whereas some will probably give you a warrantable headroom.

ASUS provide a GPU monitoring and Overclocking program with their cards, so I'd guess they, at least, probably allow some overclock headroom. Haven't used it though - that card's in a build I did for a friend!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The best thing is to find out the overclocks other people have got with the card first. Then you use a utility like ATItool or ATI Tray Tools to check for initial stability. I would then use Furmark to test for longer term stability then. Be careful though as Furmark can damage your card if you do not use it properly just like IntelBurnTest could damage your Core2 CPU.
Also make sure that the GPU temperatures are not too high - you can use GPU-Z for this.

With overclocking I tend to also avoid overclocking the video RAM more than it is rated for as it is easier to damage the video RAM permanently than the GPU itself!