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A
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Force 3D Radeon HD4870 Freezer DHT Installation/Operation Installing our Force 3D HD4870 Freezer DHT proved to be no big deal. The power connectors on the rear edge did make things a little tight with power cables plugged in but again no big deal. From the box to power up took no time and we had no issues at all with the drivers loading up (8.8 Catalyst). Temperature The Catalyst Control Panel sensor gave us an idle GPU temperature reading of 45 degrees Celsius. After fragging away in Crysis we were only able to achieve a reading of 57 degrees Celsius. The Freezer DHT does a FANTASTIC job. Our load temperatures were some 20 degrees cooler than the idle temperatures measured from a reference design HD4870 card. I can only wait to see what this thing will overclock like.
Sound Level The 75mm cooling fan on mounted on the HD4870 Freezer DHT never spun up to an audible level. Opening up the LAN box the card was in became necessary a few times just so I could confirm the fan was running. Performance Time to see what we have here with the Force 3D HD4870 Freezer DHT. We have already seen that the cooling efficiency of the unit absolutely blows everyone else away. Let's make sure it stacks up pixel wise. Our test bed is based around an ASUS Maximus Formula X38 based mainboard. The OS is Windows Vista Home Premium installed on a Western Digital SATA II HDD. Our comparison card today are going to be a Visiontek Radeon HD4870. Testing will be done with real world game play using frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program. Results are graphed in three minute segments from three game titles, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and Assassin's Creed. Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record game play from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products. Screen resolution and other settings will be listed out before each performance graph. We will also be throwing in Futuremark's 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage in the benchmark rodeo as well. ATi's Catalyst 8.8 drivers were used for both cards in all tests.
Test Bed
Results Starting the show off we have our favorite system buster, Crysis. DirectX 10 really takes a VGA card to task with it's advanced graphics capabilities in Crysis. As we have all seen before, Crysis can bring video card GPUs to their knees. We have found before that the HD4870 is happiest at 1024x768 with FSAA turned off and all settings set to 'High' for giving its best game play. Let's see how the Force 3D card stacks up.
Dead in line with a reference
design HD4870 as we expected. Pg. 1 -
Introduction
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