Radeon HD 4870 is currently the fastest card AMD/ATI has to offer. Even though it may not be able to keep up with the fastest cards from NVIDIA, it’s cheaper and in range for a lot more buyers. The prices of NVIDIA’s fastest cards have been dropping fast due to the impressive speed of the performance segment cards from AMD. ASUS has made some research on the Radeon HD 4870 and come to the conclusion that there is actually room for a few more hertz here and there. Enter ASUS EAH4870 TOP.
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ASUS EAH4870 TOP comes factory overclocked at 815MHz core and 3700MHz memory, as the reference clocks are 750MHz and 3600MHz respectively. To make sure the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (C1) processor wasn’t a limiting factor in these benchmarks, it was kept at 0 degrees Celsius with liquid nitrogen and overclocked to 4.85GHz. Fun fact: the motherboard used was the not yet released R.O.G. Rampage Extreme.
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The card would easily overclock to 865MHz core clock and 4600MHz memory clock. Although the increased memory frequency did not have much of an impact on the performance. The overclock was achieved without adjusting the stock cooler or even the fan speed. The core clock of 865MHz translates into 2.768 TFLOPS in this setup. You need 937.5MHz to break 3TFLOPS with two cards, which shouldn’t be a problem really.
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When benching some 2-way CrossFireX, the setup scored 27,913 points in 3DMark 06. With some “non-standard” cooling on the cards we’re confident they could do some serious damage to the ORB.
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