Gigabyte Radeon HD 6870 OC Graphics Card Review
Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago
A Closer LookFrom the first glance, you can see that the whole of the card is covered by a MASSIVE cooling set-up which is reflective and very “bling” which is what I think the kids of today are calling it. Am I wrong? The cooler includes three fans in total which are situated at slightly different levels on the card.
The card including cooler only takes up the usual two expansion bays and length wise isn’t too large and should fit in most cases easily without worrying.
The three fans that are fitted to the cooler are all branded by Gigabyte and feature semi-transparent blades. The cooler design has been seen on Gigabyte cards before and is known as part of their WindForce range.
The top of the card sees a set of heatpipes which connect from one aluminium heatsink through to the centre of the card.
The bottom of the card shows where one of the heatpipes ends underneath the central heatsink, whilst the other heatpipe flows round to the third heatsink. This shows us that the cooling design incorporates an aluminum heatsink for each third of the card and each have a fan to assist in the cooling of each section.
Like most Radeon 6870’s on the market, it requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors which is great to see that this card doesn’t require any more juice given its overclock speeds.
For consumers wanting more power if they are on a budget, or already have a 6870, the ability for CrossFireX is available with the connector in its usual place. Gigabyte also supply the CrossFire bridge so you’re ready to go.
The majority of the connections on this card have been protected using dust caps which can be used if particular ports aren’t in use. There are two DVI ports, a HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts which allows for this card to be perfect in an AMD Eyefinity setup using DisplayPort daisy chaining or mini DisplayPort hub technology.
