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Box and bundle

Not deviating from the Diamond usual, this box is all black, but this time, it features an eye-catching, silver colored Ruby standing on the right. The color contrasts of the box probably help it stand out from some of the often garish boxes you find other cards in. 

On the back of the box is an image from S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky, and some standard marketing exposition on the qualities of the HD 4870.

This video card comes with the following: a printed quick-start guide, a driver/manual CD, a credit for 50 free song downloads from emusic.com, a Crossfire bridge, a VGA to DVI adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, and a S-video out cable with adapter. All in all, a well put together, complete bundle that should have everything that most people are looking for.

Overclocking

The HD 4870 seems to run a bit cooler than the temperatures we were hitting with the HD 4850 last week, so we were eager to see how far this card could be pushed.

However this early in the game, there are limited overclocking tools available, so we were 'stuck' using the Catalyst Control Centre. In the CCC, the top core clock you can select is 790 MHz -- only 40 MHz above the stock 750 MHz speed. From what I can tell, it looks like this is unnecessarily set a bit lower than you would expect -- perhaps ATI wanted to leave room for further expansion of the product line. Already partners, including Diamond, have announced Black Editions and overclocked editions that have a higher possible top speed for the core unclocked. However, there was much more leeway when it came to the memory.

After a series of crash and burns, it seems liked the GPU overclocking wasn't working at nearly as well as the memory overclocking was. In the end, we were very happy running without problems at 780 MHz for the core, and a very impressive 1090 MHz for the memory. Seeing these results really makes us look forward to see what some extensive cooling and better overclocking tools will be able to accomplish. With the GDDR5 already very fast at 900 MHz, running at 1090 induced some big, fat grins in the testing lab.