Mr. Freeze

The Force 3D HD4870 Freezer DHT is easily distinguishable because of it's aftermarket cooler strapped on top.  This cooler makes the Force 3D Radeon a dual slot graphics solution.  Length wise there shouldn't be any trouble here as the Force 3D card is only 9 5/8 inches long.

  

Let's examine this cooler a bit closer.  The Freezer DHT is comprised of an aluminum convection fin platform that sports three heatpipes.  These heatpipes conduct heat up from the GPU for more efficient cooling.  The entire assembly is covered in an air shroud that channels the air from a 75mm fan positioned at the center of the convection fins out either side.

  

You can see below how the heatpipes help distribute the GPU's heat to sections of the convection fin assembly increasing the efficiency of the entire unit.

  

Surprisingly, the Freezer DHT cooler is elevated and is only in contact with the GPU.  No cooling for the memory.  I would have liked to have seen some BGA style RAM sinks here but we'll have to see how they do with air from the fan blowing over their surface once we power things up.

  

Freezer DHT as in Direct Heatpipe Touch.  This is the same design we first saw with Kingwin on their Revolution Coolers released last year.  The principle is simple, by placing the cooler's heatpipes in direct contact with the GPU, heat is whisked away faster.  It's a principle that works so well, it is amazing that no one thought of this before.  Heatpipes until recently were sandwiched in an aluminum or copper billet that was mounted to the CPU/GPU.  Yet again, simple is best.

  

Here are a couple of shots of the Radeon HD4870 GPU rated at 750MHz with a reported texture fill rate of 27.2 Gigatexels/sec and a Pixel fill rate of 16.8 Gigapixels/sec.  We also see the GDDR5 memory used here which is 3.6GHz Qimonda in the exact same configuration seen on other HD4870 cards we have looked at.  The card has 512 MB of memory on a 256-bit memory bus.

  

Back to the big picture at the rear of the card are two PCI-E 6-pin power connections.  Force 3D recommends a minimum of at least a 500w PSU for their HD4870 Freezer DHT and at least a 600w PSU should you run it in Crossfire.  Personally, I'd suggest at least a 600w PSU for a single card config and a 750w PSU for Crossfire.

Native CrossfireX as you can see.  Every CrossfireX card comes with one Crossfire bridge cable.  Two cables are needed to run Crossfire.  But don't think you are being cheated, two cards means you have two cables.

The connection end shows a finger guard to allow some thermal exhaust but this air isn't forced out so it is less than totally efficient.  Two DVI outputs and a single component port.  Remember that the HD4870 supports HDMI with 7.1 surround audio as well as Blu-ray (assuming of course you have a Blu-Ray player in your rig.)

 

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Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card
Pg. 3 - Installation/Noise/Benchmarks
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks
Pg. 5 - Image Quality/Overclocking/Conclusion