The MSI card is similar in most respects to the ATI reference 4870 1GB card. The card has a troll-like creature on the cover along with the R4870 logo and MSI's Game with MSI logo. The fan is on the rear of the heatsink and blows air through the front grill of the card. The fan is a 47-fin radial fan that has been used in many an ATI card over the years.

The rear of the card has two 6-pin power connectors as the HD 4870 card requires more than 140W. This is far less power than the GTX280 card requires at 236W, but is still more power than a single 6-pin power connector would require. MSI outfits this card with 4 2048-bit GDDR5 memory chips rated at 900MHz. Due to the nature of GDDR5 memory, the memory bandwidth is effectively doubled over GDDR3 memory at the same speed. The HD 4870 has 115.2GB/second of memory bandwidth with 1024MB of memory being awesome for games that require that level of Framebuffer memory.

ATI has been making PCI Express video cards for years since the launch of the LGA-775 CPU family. Video cards and motherboards have migrated to the PCI Express Generation 2.0 standard. A video card like the HD 4870 is a PCIe 2.0 card, offering twice the bandwidth over the 1st generation PCI Express bus. The IO of the board consists of two Dual Link DVI ports and a TV out like every other modern video card. The use of a HDMI port or a DisplayPort is possible through an adapter.