Over the last couple of weeks we have taken a look at a couple of Radeon HD 4850 parts, which impressed us with their price to performance ratio, while also offering an impressive feature set. And today, we move up a notch in both pricing and the performance terms, as we take our first look at the Radeon HD 4870 courtesy of Sapphire's reference based offering. This particular SKU features the same core architecture, but with higher clock speeds and a massive increase in memory bandwidth. With competition heating up due to some massive price drops from NVIDIA in recent weeks, we'll see if this particular part can continue to compete in its segment of the cut-throat graphics market. - Elite Bastards

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB Video Card Review

As per the Radeon HD 4850 video card we looked at recently from Sapphire, this very particular Radeon HD 4870 offering uses AMD's reference clock speeds, meaning that it sticks with the 750MHz core and 1800MHz memory clocks. As is almost traditional now for AMD's flagship offerings, the reference cooling solution is a dual slot affair which covers much of the board, and aims to vent any hot air produced by the card out of the rear of the system chassis. The Radeon HD 4870 requires the use of two 6-pin power connectors. The star of the box art bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Lara Croft.

Oddly, Sapphire still seems happy to market the board as only a DirectX 10 part, with no mention of DirectX 10.1 actually. Sapphire's bundle with this board has plenty going on short of any included games, featuring a 2GB USB flash drive and a disc of AMD demos, wallpapers, a couple of CyberLink software, paper manual, two molex to PCI Express power connectors, video out cables and a CrossFire inter-GPU connector. With using ATI's own Catalyst Overdrive tool to perform overclocking, we reached a stable core clock speed of 780MHz, making for a simple 30MHz bump in clock speed without any stability issues.

When it came to the GDDR5 memory on board however, we found ourselves with plenty of headroom, eventually reaching a stable clock speed of 2180MHz from its default clock of 1800MHz, making for a very nice 380MHz speed increase. Unfortunately, despite the amount of headroom the GDDR5 memory provided, our various clock speed increases didn't really reap any massive rewards in game performance. In quite a turnaround from these two companies last generation graphics offerings, this time it's NVIDIA that seems to have a better handle on idle power consumption, offering lower usage than either Radeon HD 4800 series

At default fan speeds, being at idling or under load, there's really nothing to tell between Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 and the GeForce GTX 260 as far as noise levels are concerned, and to be honest neither cooler is particularly noticeable over the noise of an average desktop system. If you want to crank up fan speeds manually however, then the Radeon HD 4870 soon overtakes its rival as the loudest of the bunch, although chances are that you won't be wanting to do this on any of these boards unless you have some kind of wish to be distracted by loud fans as you might be working already in a loud environment.

The average Radeon HD 4870 card is still cheaper than even the lowest priced GeForce GTX 260, and AMD's latest flagship single GPU offering could well be the part that raises the image quality bar by making anti-aliasing the weapon of choice for any discerning gamer out there. The Radeon HD 4870's multi sampling performance is the stuff of dreams, and coupled with the rest of its feature set and the low price point of Sapphire's offering, it would be very hard for us to do anything but recommend it as the graphics board of choice for anyone looking for a new graphics board with this kind of budget in mind.