Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD4870 X2 2048MB Graphics Card

**Jason**

The features, specifications, real world performance, and physical appearance are all incredible. It is one of the highest performance cards on the market, while also probably being one of the coolest and quietest. This low noise and low heat is even more impressive when you consider that it isn't just the GPU being cooled, but the CPU and the case, too.

**Jason** · Posted: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:54:11 Post Subject:

I decided to move this card into my main rig... A quad core 65W Xeon 3210 that I generally run overclocked to 2.66GHz (8x 333MHz, 1333MHz FSB) at 1.19V. The motherboard is a P5K Pro P35 chipset, with 8GB of DDR2 G.Skill 4-4-4-12 memory running at 888MHz. Cooler I had been using is a OCZ Vendetta 2 which keeps the load temperatures around 48C and idle temperatures around 37C with this setup.

With the Atomic card in, I saw some scary CPU temperatures initially, so I did some testing before leaving it. The chart labeled "Underclocked" below was with the CPU at 1.6GHZ (6x 266MHz, 1066MHz FSB) and 0.99V. Each core idled between 56-60C and load temperatures were between 69-75C! Pretty hot, but nothing compared to stock speed.

I returned the system to stock speeds and voltages, everything on auto: 2.13GHz (8x 266MHz, 1066MHz FSB) at 1.19V. See "Stock Speed" labeled chart below. 62-68C idle, and 87-98C load! I didn't let the load test run too long here, and I was glad I survived the minute or so it lasted!

I won't be trying an overclocked test!

While the GPU stays in the 40-50C range all the time, this really is a bad cooler for high end processors. It was acceptable on the E8400 used in the review, but just plain sad on this quad core Xeon!