Given the level of excitement the Radeon HD 4850 left, not only with us, but also gamers and enthusiasts all over the world, the Radeon HD 4870 quickly became extremely anticipated by people. Will it beat the GeForce GTX 260? How much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 is it? Can it out-perform the GeForce GTX 280? How does CrossFire scale? These are all questions that we want answered, and today we intend to have answers for all of them. On paper the Radeon HD 4870 looks to be the right card for a lot of people. And on the internet, looking at early prices it also seems to be the right one. Ultimately though, where it's going to come down to is performance. - Tweaktown

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire Version Preview

While the Radeon HD 4870 may come in significantly cheaper than the GeForce GTX 280, it can't perform significantly lower. Well it's aloud to be a little lower, but ultimately if AMD intend to get any form of speed crown it has to perform extremely well in a CrossFire environment. CrossFire is going to constantly have the upper hand over SLI thanks to the huge amount of Intel based chipsets out there and all of the people jumping on the CrossFire bandwagon. It's not only an easier setup, but a much cheaper one too. We've got Sapphire cards again on hand, we say cards because we have two of these graphics cards!

The first thing you notice is just how similar the box art is to that of the Radeon HD 4850. While we do have a slightly different lady on the front of the box, the rest of it is pretty similar. The middle has the prepare to dominate motto while across the bottom we have the model and some of the main features. Across the top of the card we have the Sapphire logo. Moving across, we have some ATI ones along with the Vista one. The top right corner mentions that the card is PCI Express. Just below this we have mention that a copy of 3DMark06 is included in the package along with 512MB of GDDR5 memory.

While the cooler might be slightly different to the Radeon HD 3870, the card on a whole does feel very similar. Unlike the Radeon HD 4850, the card is of dual slot design which means instead of the traditional fan style we have the same type that we saw on the Radeon HD 3870. Of course, Sapphire has stickered the cooler up, letting people know that the card is from them. Looking around the card, it's simply awesome to see that AMD has opted for dual 6-pin PCI Express connectors over the use of an 8-pin one. This means that more people can simply get straight into using the card without having to lose other connectors.

There is a lot about the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870 that is very similar in the specification department. Both cards have 965 million transistors, 55nm built core, 800 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 render back ends. The Radeon HD 4870 is more of a Radeon HD 4850 card on steroids with a bump in the core from 625MHz to 750MHz and a 1800MHz memory clock on the 512MB of GDDR5 memory. The move GDDR5 has boosted the memory data rate massively. The move to GDDR5 is meant to mean that the large 512-bit memory bus isn't needed while still being able to offer massive performance.

The single Radeon HD 4870 does an excellent job at standing its ground, floating around the GeForce GTX 260 card. Like the Radeon HD 4850, turning on anti-aliasing doesn't cause the card to fall to its knees as was the case with the Radeon HD 3800 series of cards of last generation. The dual slot cooler does a good job of keeping noise to a dull roar, while helping drop those temps as well. This was something that was a concern with the Radeon HD 4850. There isn't a doubt in our mind that we will see companies begin to change the Radeon HD 4850 cooler to dual slot options to get the temps way down.

If you're looking for a new single card graphics card solution, which way do you go? Well, the Radeon HD 4870 manages to come in lower than the GeForce GTX 260 while on the most part being able to compete with it, though the latter card is heavily overclocked. That's good news for ATI since the Radeon HD 4870 hasn't got its clock speeds increased at all. The good news for AMD is that it doesn't smash the Radeon HD 4870 and the leads are only small and the price gap is literally double.