“Despite delivering both excellent thermal and gameplay performance on the whole, we can’t help but feel that the Gainward HD 4870 1024MB Golden Sample is a little bit of a letdown, especially considering the £30 price premium it carries over the stock HD 4870 1GB. For that extra fifteen percent of investment the in game frame rate returns are generally around the two to three percent mark thanks to the very conservative core overclock, which is pretty disappointing.”Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:
- Sapphire Radeon HD4650 OC Edition 512mb GDDR3 @ Modders-Inc
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 – Budget Overclocking @ OC3D
- Asus EAH4850 HTDI/512M/A Radeon HD 4850 Videocard Review @ PCSTATS
- MSI R4830 512MB Overclock Edition Review @ OCC
- MSI R4850 @ Neoseeker
- ATI HD4850 Roundup with non-reference cards @ Metku.net
- Sapphire HD4870 Toxic @ Bjorn3D
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 @ Modders-Inc
- ASUS EAH3870 X2 Top/G/3DHTI/1G/A Radeon HD 3870 X2 @ PCSTATS
- MSI R4870 T21G ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB @ motherboards.org
- Sapphire Radeon 4870 X2 @ PureOverclock
- Diamond HD 3650 PE 512 Radeon HD 3650 @ PCSTATS
- Scythe Musashi GPU Cooler @ Pro-Clockers
- ATI Catalyst 8.11 Analysis – XP & Vista @ Tweaktown
- Akasa Vortexx Neo @ techPowerUp
- Palit 9800GTX+ Review @ OCC
- Zotac AMP Graphics Card Round Up @ Virtual-Hideout
- XFX 9800GTX+ Black Edition @ motherboards.org
- BFG GTX 260 OCX MAXCORE (216SP) 896MB Video Card Review @ Hardware Canucks
- MSI GeForce 9800GT 512MB @ Phoronix
- XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews
This gold isn’t the soundest investment

The Gainward
HD 4870 1024MB Golden Sample runs 25MHz over stock at 775MHz on the GPU and 100MHz faster for the memory clock, effectively 4,000MHz when you push the Turbo button. That is enough speed to notice an improvement over the basic HD4870 and the non-standard cooling solution did help with the heat. The increase in performance does come at an increase in price, on high enough that bit-tech would not really recommend this card as a good value, especially with it’s lackluster overclocking abilties.