PowerColor’s HD 4870 has a Better Design, Worse BIOS?
As soon as we got the PowerColor’s HD 4870, the luxury design attracted us: 4+2 phase digital powering, new cooler from ZeroThermal, higher clock than a reference 4870, but the price stay as low as a reference card. So we can’t wait to try it out.
After one day’s test, we found the card delivers a gorgeous performance, but lower stability. For one thing, BIOS limited fan speed too low, that results in a higher GPU temperature; For the other thing, it gets through 3DMark Vantage, but fails to complete FurMark test. We believe it’s the BIOS setting that causes these problems and asked PowerColor for a new BIOS, but the answer was not avalaible yet.
In any case, the PowerColor’s HD 4870 surprises us with its elaborate design. We’re expecting PowerColor to release a refine BIOS to make it better than the best.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:13 am
It’s not the BIOS guys, it is the same problem that plagues every single Diamond 4870 XOC BE. The VRMs need much more massive cooling than this in order for the card to be able to survive FurMark. With this puny heatsink they will heat up past their operating range (i.e. over 125C and the card will crash). Do this enough times and your card will die. Also, potentially you have to look at the amperage draw of the GPU when your crash happens as I’d be betting it will be quite high. There has been a number of discussions on this already on NCIX forums, XS, and there is one proposed solution here http://www.clunk.org.uk/forums/user-reviews/8855-thermalright-hr03-gt-ati-hd-4870-a.html This is something I tried on the XOC BE, but this guy took it a step further and actually leveled the HR-09 on the VRMs. Anyways take a look and like I said, do not expect the BIOS to fix anything.
August 16th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Nice link, thanks.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:41 am
Seems same situation with stock-cooling, and temp. diode showing wrong temps. Also a furmark issue?
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=66763&