“The other day we looked at the Smooth Creations Asylum and inside was the new Diamond HD 4870 XOC Black Edition. This isn’t your normal overclocked HD 4870, though; if you have a look at the specifications on the thing, you will quickly discover that the card is packing some mega serious clock speeds.So what we’ve done is pull the card out of the Smooth Creations rig and install it into our testbed to see how the card performs against some of our other favorites. Since this wasn’t a retail sample, we won’t be looking at the package today. What we will do is have a quick look around the card and then check out the clockspeeds before moving onto the testing phase.”
Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:
- PowerColor HD 4870 @ Bjorn3D
- Powercolor PCS HD 4850 512 MB @ techPowerUp
- Single HD 4870 X2 vs Two HD 4870s on P45 @ Tweaktown
- Workstation Graphics Card Comparison Guide @ TechARP
- Xirex 4mm Thick Water Block Tested for Geforce 8800 GT @ Madshrimps
- ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra Video Card Review @ Hardware Secrets
- BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX: fast but fast enough @ HEXUS
- ECS GeForce 9600 GT Graphics Card @ Tweaktown
- ASUS TOP 512MB GeForce 9600GT Graphics Card Review @ Bigbruin
Black Diamond

The usual specs for an HD4870 are 750MHz in the core and 900MHz for the RAM (aka 3600MHz) the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition’s core runs at 800MHz and the RAM has been bumped to 1100MHz, or 4400MHz. The overclocked card does require a bit more juice, but not excessively so; it also won’t be that much more expensive than the vanilla card once it becomes available. You can see how well it does against the 280 over at TweakTown.