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Cooling
The Cooling is qite impressive with no noticeable noise at the default settings. More telling is the fantastic results with the fan set to 100%. I would suggest a happy medium should be easy to find with any performance load. Noise During testing for the cooling system I also reorded the system noise level. Using a digital sound level meter (SLM) I captured the Idle and load sound levels at both the default fan settings and at 100%.
While the overall system noise level starts at 65 dB the ambient noise is only a mild hum during normal operation. Under the desk it is hardly noticeable. During testing the system sat at ear level and measurements were taken from three feet away. I can assure you, you do not want to run the fan at 100% all the time! The jump to 62 dB during load testing is the difference between a background hum and a shrill buzz. The drop in temperature while at 100% for the default idle measurements is impressive though. As I suggested above, you need to find your own happy medium between performance and noise levels but even at default the cooling is more than capable of handling the system load. Overclocking The Sapphire HD4870 Toxic Overclock Edition has already pushed the stock clocks beyond the reference clock speeds. Still with every card there is the potential for just a bit more. To get a good stable overclock without the extra noise we setting the card fan to 50% and the fan control on the GMC Ebony case for the systems fans to 100% and started inching the clocks up. After a couple of attempts I was able to get a stable overclock of 810 MHz for the GPU and 1095 for the memory. The side effect is an increase to 62C for the idle temperature. Not every benchmark would run error free so I backed it down to 810/1030 MHz where things stabilized. To get an idea of how this small overclocking effects performance I ran a couple extra benchmarks in 3DMark Vantage:
As you can see from these two stable overclocking attempts, the Toxic reaches the point of diminishing returns at any stable setup over the factory overclock. I guess if you want to go faster, you are going to need to add a second 4870 Toxic to get there! Conclusion With the Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic Overclock Edition, Sapphire has closed the door on the 3800 series with a bang. Not only does a single 4870 outdistance the previous generation even with the X2, it also comes in an an amazing price tag. I haven't seen a price to performance value like this since the first 8800 GTs. The performance you get for around $245 is often on par with the more expensive GTX 280 and everything runs nicely with the single processor. Those on a tighter budget can get essentially the same processor with slower GDDR3 in the 4850 series as well. With the HD4870 Toxic 512 MB edition we discussed the price premium for the Toxic series as the only real drawback. Now by adding 1 GB of GDDR5 to the outstanding Vapor-X cooling and dropping the prices the Sapphire Toxic series have become the go to series for mainstream gamers and budget minded performance builds. I expect these cards to continue to drop in price making a second 4870 Toxic an attractive upgrade as the year progresses. Stuck in an older generation still? It's finally making sense to make the jump to a 4870 and with Sapphire you just can't go wrong.
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