December 3, 2008

A Review for WGT 2008 Malaysia & EAH4870 TOP

ASUS is indeed a great brand and provides good services. Whenever I join WGT known as World Game Master Tournament, I always hope to win great prizes from ASUS, its hardwares, thus, I was downhearted when I got to know the prizes for the WGT 2008 were cash prizes. However, it is still good because ASUS had increased the cash prize from RM 14,000.00 to RM37,000.00. It was a great experience for me personally and I am looking forward to defend my title next year for WGT 2009.

The PC performance in the WGT2008, thanks to ASUS that has brought us gorgeous visual and to another level of Vista as it is always unstable. Afterall, we are the only country uses Vista, I am proud of ASUS Malaysia for this achievement. Additionally, it's nice to see the EAH4870 TOP outperform the HD 4850 by 20 FPS at 1600x1200 with 4x AA, 8x AF and HDR enabled.

Almost five months ago ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 were launched, ASUS has overclocked Radeon HD 4870 for even more power, "TOP" card in the form of the EAH4870 TOP. The TOP line-up from ASUS is prestigious that they don't get a card and just add an extra 10MHz to the core and 20MHz to the memory, the TOP line-up of cards are really well overclocked cards that stand out from the competition.

Like most other HD 4870s on store shelves, the EAH4870 TOP sports 512MB of GDDR5 memory and a 256-bit memory bus. In fact, this card is awarded with 2nd Generation 55nm GPU Solution, World's Fastest DDR5 Memory on board (3.7GHz). Additionally, the card features support for DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, and CrossFireX multi-GPU technology. ASUS has increased the core from 750MHz to 815MHz. The memory clock has also been increased from 900MHz (3600MHz Data Rate) to 925MHz (3700MHz Data Rate).

With a higher price as well as increased clock speed, the Asus TOP will have to beat the Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 soundly to be worth buying.The overclocked memory leads to increased memory bandwidth, boosting it from 115GB/sec to 118.4GB/sec, partially more than the 112GB/sec from a stock-speed GeForce GTX 260. Comparing the performance of the Asus TOP with that of a stock-speed HD 4870, we can see some definite improvements.
I have played Call of Duty 4 to test on the Top Card, as well as on GeForce GTX 260. The latter provides an interesting comparison with the Asus TOP. The GTX 260 is the best at all resolutions by a stock-speed Radeon 4870, so it's no surprise that the Asus TOP is even faster. A little tweak can be done on a pre-overclocked graphics card, and by using AMD's GPU Clock Tool v0.9.8, we raised the GPU frequency from 815MHz to 860MHz. This increased the minimum frame rate of CoD4 at 1,920 x 1,200 by 2fps to 42fps.I managed to overclock the GPU of the Asus TOP to 880MHz but, while CoD4 ran without any graphical corruption, we saw no further increase in the frame rate. Settling on a GPU speed of 860MHz, I increased the memory from 1.85GHz to 1.98GHz (3.96GHz effective), and managed to squeeze a further 1fps out of CoD4 at 1,920 x 1,200. My overclocking increased the minimum frame rate by 3fps at 1,920 x 1,200.

In conclusion, looking at the numbers, the ASUS EAH4870 TOP is faster than a stock-speed GeForce GTX 260 (and even the pre-overclocked Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP) in CoD4.

There's only one thing that Radeon HD 4870 users are worry about which is the heat that being produced. A research team found out that Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards using the reference cooler do get very hot, with the average idle temperature exceeding 70 degrees without any software tweaks. Increasing the fan speed does help, but then that also increases the volume, turning an otherwise quiet graphics card into a bit of a hair dryer. As a result, this overclocked Radeon HD 4870 should only run slightly hotter than the standard cards as the fan will simply throttle up more regularly to deal with the additional heat. Therefore, we do expect that this Radeon HD 4870 will make a little bit more noise than usual, with the advantage of a little extra performance.

What people really want when they buy a TOP card from ASUS is performance and this card manages to deliver, therefore the feminine look of the cooler with its pink flowers on the card isn't an issue at all. Moreover, you don't see because the card facing down all the time. But it was still a surprise to see the design when pulling the card out of the box.


However, overall the ASUS HD 4870 TOP is a good card. With all the cables and accessories we need to the card up, we can easily setup the card without any hassles. A few extra dollars, you do not need to overclocking yourself as wrongly overclocked, might burn up the motherboard and spoil the card.



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