Home > Consumer Reviews > Sapphire Radeon HD4870 1GB DDR5 Dual DVI / TVO PCI-Express Graphics Card

When it comes to bang for your buck, you can't beat this card. The thing is a powerhouse. You can run just about any game out there in high resolution (1600x1050) at wonderful quality settings and still get a nice frame rate. This Sapphire card is built very nicely too. You get a temperature monitoring fan and some nice heat pipes to carry the heat away from the chips. Look at any professional review of this card and they'll tell you that it's absolutely worth the price.

The reason I take away one star from my review is because this thing is a power-hungry and space-hungry monster. At maximum, it consumes over 130 watts of power! It takes 2 6-pin PCI-E connectors, is the width of 2 slots on your motherboard and has a length that threatens to consume every last bit of space you have in your case. I had to do some major rearranging inside my case just to get this guy to fit in there, and it's still tight! It also doesn't help that the PCI-E power connectors hang off the back of the card increasing its length by a few centimeters.

It is recommended to have a 500W+ power supply just to keep this guy going, but that is the bare minimum. I would recommend nothing less than 600W or 750W if you plan on running 2 of these in Crossfire. I would absolutely not have the room to fit 2 of these in my case, so Crossfire is really not an option for me.

Back to the card... I am always impressed with the extra adapters and junk that come with ATI cards. You get 2 crossfire adapters, a DVI > VGA adapter and even a DVI > HDMI adapter. Oh, and of course they give you 2 4-pin power connector-to-PCI-E power connectors in case your power supply doesn't have 2. Pretty sweet.

All in all, this is a great card that is easily worth the money, but is not built for the feint of heart. The thing sucks up major juice, space and puts out a ton of heat. I would definitely recommend, but make sure you got the gear to accommodate this beast.

This card is amazing! You will get Blazing graphics coming out form your monitor or HD TV. I'm a gamer and I like to play games at Full Specs, I play Crysis at 1600x1050 with 8x anti aliasing without problems.

Its a big card, so consider your mainboard and PSU, because the card will make some connectors useless.

I have compared with a NVIDIA GFX 260 and I got better performance from the ATI HD 4870.

I have to hand it to ATI...er....AMD....on the launch of this card.

I was doubtful, but wanted to put it to the test. Using 3Dmark, I was able to score over 20k using this card.

System config:
Intel Q6600
XFX 780i Motherboard
Sapphire HD4870
Corsair Dominator
Cosair 750w Power Supply
WD 150GB Raptor
Antec Nine Hundred

I have to admit that the card is pretty large, but so are the GTX series cards from NVIDIA. I had a tough time getting two of these to fit in my NINE HUNDRED case from Antec. Eventually I gave up because I couldn't get two to fit in the case.

So I did what anyone would do who bought two cards, and built another system! (i've got a 3rd car garage filled with parts, it's out of control)

I was surprised at the performance of the card. I play COD4 for atleast 3 hours a day and this card eats it up with no problems.

I have to give big props to Amazon.

I'm starting to buy more and more components from Amazon because of the free shipping, no tax, and they are sharp on price surprisingly!

This card is magnificent, with the new catalyst drivers thus baby runs any new generation game with ease, paired with my new core i7 920 it is more than enough to run crysis at max settings. I plan to buy the second and do crossfire and relax for a while with it's incredible performance.

Wonderfull, Amazing, surpass all my expectation.I can play Crysis without any lag with x8 AA and AF x16 same goes for all high end games, specially Fallout 3.I highly recomend this Video card.