The day has finally come when ATI is ready to introduce the full power of its RV770 chip. As we have said many times before, the RV770 is a DirectX 10.1 chip developed in 55nm with 965 million transistors and most importantly, with support for GDDR5 memory. It's also important to mention that RV770 has 800 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 render back ends. This new verdion which high clock speeds and better memory will need to lead ATI into the next battle with NVIDIA and turn the tables in favor of the red team. On that aspect AMD is playing the price to performance game quite well by launching cheaper graphics cards with great game play. - FudZilla

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB Video Card Review

The memory is the key difference compared to the Radeon HD 4850, the lower RV770 based card. The GDDR5 memory will definitely confuse the hell out of you, as it actually works at 1800MHz but in theory it will match the performance of 3600MHz strong GDDR3 memory. The answer why is quite complex, as officially GDDR5 from Qimonda works at 1800MHz. ATI's RV770, the chip behind Radeon HD 4870, works at 750MHz and needs a dual slot cooler. The memory bus is 256-bit wide and this is the same compared as on the old RV670 chip. The RV770 cores used on both cards are the same chips clocked differently.

The card itself looks very similar to Radeon HD 3870, but this time it has two 6-pin power connectors and just like the Radeon HD 3870, this card has two CrossFire connectors on top of the card. Naturally, the card supports PCI Express 2.0 standard, but it should work just fine with previous generations as well. Sapphire's card will cost around $329 in US e-tail. During testing, the card was heating up to 80°C and was stable with these temps, but at the same time it was not that noisy. It's hard to put into words, but it was not the most quiet card we've heard, although it came very close.

Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 is one impressive card. ATI shows that it can be the leader again. This is the first card to use GDDR5 memory and ATI just added one cool marchitecture to its portfolio. This card continues the 55nm leadership and also supports DirectX 10.1, while not even NVIDIA's flagship, the GeForce GTX 280, upside down naming edition, doesn't support any of these marchitectures. When it comes to performance, the Radeon HD 4870 wins against the G92, including the chip clocked to 760MHz which gives an interesting implication that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is likely to lose from the Radeon HD 4870.

The alternative is that NVIDIA might increase the clocks to beat ATI but it will be close. One thing is certain, we are sure that the Radeon HD 4870's current performance leadership in the sub-$300 market means a certain price war and you, our bellowed readers, will benefit, as the prices will have to go down. For the price of a single GeForce GTX 280 you can buy two Radeon HD 4870's and get a decent lunch while you're at it. We can highly recommend this ATI masterpiece, and the Radeon HD 4870 is probably the best card money can buy in sub-$300 price range, but we are sure that this price will go down.