Image Quality

As we have said so many times before, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Rather than tell you what looks good and what doesn't check out the two screen shots from Assassin's Creed and UT3 both with max settings at 1920x1440 resolution.

Overclocking

Here's where we really get to see the power of the Freezer DHT.  Remembering that the factory settings for the GPU and memory are 750Mhz/3.6GHz respectively, let's see what we can see.  

After tapping out the Catalyst Auto Tune Panel at 800MHz/4.4GHz for the GPU and memory we have an indication of what the Freezer DHT equipped card can do.  At these settings in game play, the graphics continues to be silky smooth.  No visual anomalies or distortions whatsoever.  Very impressive.

Conclusion

Performance wise at stock settings the Force 3D HD4870 Freezer DHT card is right in line with what we have seen before with other HD4870 units.  This being a very solid high performance card offering lots of pixel pushing power for under $300.  Don't forget that this card also supports HDMI 7.1 audio, Blu-Ray and HD Video.  If that isn't enough, you can always pick up two cards (accepting you have a Crossfire motherboard) and double your pleasure.

Where the Force 3D card really shines and steps way out ahead of the competition is with the Freezer DHT cooler.  Our load temperatures were some 20 degrees cooler than what we saw as idle temperatures with reference design HD4870 boards.  This superior cooling also kept the variable rate fan spinning so low as to be silent.  But with spectacular cooling often comes spectacular overclocking.   The Freezer DHT cooler card maxed out the Catalyst built in overclocker at 800MHz on the core and 4.4GHz on the memory and ran that so rock solid I know there is more room in there.

There isn't anything negative to point out unless you want to nit pick and say there wasn't a PCI-E power adapter included.  My hope is that we will soon see a number of retailers offering this high performance and very cool running HD4870 here in North America soon.  This is too sweet a card to miss.

Pros

• Best cooled HD4870 on the market right now

• Great overclocker

• Excellent performance

• Dual DVI

• Very good image quality

• Supports Blu-Ray and HD Video

• HDMI 7.1 Audio

• CrossFireX ready

Cons

• Availability in North America questionable at this time

BACK                    HOME

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