About a week or so ago we had the opportunity to check out the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 video card and we came away from there knowing that AMD had hit a home run with the Radeon HD 4800 series cards. Today we are going to be examining the big brother of Radeon HD 3850, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 which features 55nm technology and support GDDR5 memory and least we forget it also supports DirectX 10.1. Basically the Sapphire Radeon HD 4800 series is eating NVDIIA's lunch. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 GPU brings the power of graphics supercomputing to gamers, setting a new standard. Redefine the way you play and takes gaming to the best-in-class performance. - Hi-Tech Reviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 GDDR5 Video Card Review

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 series GPU's deliver a cinematic gaming experience with unprecedented performance and visual effects. The powerful new TeraScale graphics will propel you deep into your gameplay with seamless frame rates and high resolutions. Enhanced anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering create striking graphics with unparalleled realism so you can max out the settings of the most demanding next generation games or revitalize your favorite titles. Play today while preparing for tomorrow with tessellation, support for DirectX 10.1 and scalable ATI CrossFireX technology, at a very affordable price.

The front of the Radeon HD 4870 video cards carton has a wealth of information on it and all of it worth mentioning since it is all an integral part of the card and it's operation. At the top we have three dot whack stickers that let you know the this is one of ATI's premium graphics cards. Next we have the CrossFireX sticker, unless you have been under a rock you will know what CrossFireX is, in short it is the answer to NVIDIA's SLI configuration. ATI's CrossFireX is the ultimate multi-GPU gaming platform. Enabling serious game power, CrossFireX technology enables two or more discrete graphics processors to work together.

After we checked out the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 we thought we had seen the best that ATI had to offer. We found just how wrong we were when we ran our first test with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870. Here is a video card that has NVIDIA scratching it's head try to find card that will compete with it. Being a true ATI fan boy we think it is great that the roles have finally been reverse and for now ATI has the best performing and selling cards available today. It may be a bit early to forecast this but if we were picking the top video card of year it would either be the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 or the ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card.