Force3D submitted both their Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 cards for a review. Once we open up the box we see that the cards themselves are 100% reference based products. There's nothing sub-standard about the Force3D products, in the future we do hope to see stuff like custom cooling.

The Force3D Radeom HD 4850 will run at a 625 clock frequency and comes with 512MB GDDR3 memory (framebuffer) clocked at 1986 MHz. These two factors are pretty much the biggest difference opposed to the big brother 4870.

You can expect roughly a 110 Watt peak watt power consumption. At a 199 USD introduction price, this product is just going to rock, but don't take my word for that, judge for yourself once we show you the benchmark results. Last thing I need to mention, all these features did not make this a huge bulky product, in fact it's a nice single-slot design. So yes, this is going to be an interesting product for sure.

Bundled we see the following:

• Radeon HD 4850
• Manual
• Driver CD
• Crossfire connector
• CRT-DVI dongle
• DVI-HDMI dongle
• 3-way RCA analog component cable
• SVIDEO / Composite dongle
• Molex to 6-pin power converter (1x)

Force3D Radeon HD 4870

An good improvement of that Radeon HD 4850 is the Force3D Radeon HD 4870. You already know it yet exactly the same GPU is mounted on this board, yet there are some distinct differences to be found. Making this card substantially faster.

First off; you will notice that AMD's board partners will have higher clock frequencies on this product boosting out some more performance. The core/shader domain is clocked at 750 MHz (default reference clock).

Secondly, the product has been armed with GDDR5 memory and that certainly makes a difference. Accumulated GDDR5 has much higher frequency based memory versus tight timings. This memory will get the product an overall peak bandwidth of 3.6 Gbps. And that's just fast (GDDR3 on 4850 = 2.0 Gbps). Though the real clock frequency is 900 MHz, the outcome in effective bandwidth is the sustained data rate x4. See, the memory frequency is double that of double data rate. This will give the 4870 an astounding 115.2GB/s at 3600 MHz, while still being on the 256-bit memory bus.

Faster clocks and memory obviously will also result into a slightly higher peak wattage power consumption and therefore it's consuming roughly 50 Watts more than the 4850; at 160 watt, yet also it does create more heat. Due to that this product is based on a dual-slot design. We'll obviously look at power consumption and heat levels in this article as well. Features wise we see the same stuff. The new UVD 2.0 engine supporting dual-stream decoding (Bluray 2.0 standard), 7.1 Channel lossless sound pass-through over HDMI, DirectX 10.1 and backwards compatibility.

Bundled we see the following:

• Radeon HD 4870
• Manual
• Driver CD
• Crossfire connector
• CRT-DVI dongle
• DVI-HDMI dongle
• 3-way RCA analog component cable
• SVIDEO / Composite dongle
• Molex to 6-pin power converter (1x)