Just a few weeks back we took a look at the latest mid-range card in ATI's new Radeon HD 4800 line-up. While maybe not the fastest dog on the track, the the Radeon HD 4850 offered an unmatched performance to price ratio and even managed to give its dual-GPU'd predecessor, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 a run for its money. At the time we couldn't get our grubby mits on ATI's top-end card the Radeon HD 4870 so our comparison seemed slightly weighted in the favor of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 series. However, PowerColor has been kind enough to send over one of their stock clocked Radeon HD 4870's and we're going to be putting it head to head with everything the green team has to offer. - Overclock3D

PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 512MB Graphics Review

On paper the Radeon HD 4870 card may look like nothing more than a core and memory overclocked version of the Radeon HD 4850 with an upgrade to GDDR5 memory. However, the transfer from GDDR3 to GDDR5 memory has given the Radeon HD 4870 card a significant boost in memory bandwidth from 1.9Gbps to 3.0Gbps with an actual reduction in memory clock speed. For obvious reasons the GDDR5 architecture should also scale much higher than GDDR3, potentially giving more headroom when overclocking. So with all this extra performance, will the Radeon HD 4870 be able to perform even better on our cost per frame scale.

While some manufacturers go for unneccesarily large and extravogant packaging with oodles of extras that often get pushed aside, PowerColor have always managed to keep a focus on value for money and as such haven't succumbed to this often expensive tactic in order to make their product stand out. This is very much true for the Radeon HD 4870 card we have today which is presented in a slimline cardboard box, and as such not much bigger than the graphics card itself. PowerColor have decided to outfit the front of the Radeon HD 4870 box with a CGI character fully dressed in armour, brandishing a rather large sword.

Using only the the ATI Overdrive facility built into the driver control panel, the maximum overclock we were able to obtain from the Radeon HD 4870 was 790MHz on the core and 4360MHz on the memory. With further fine tuning and a utility such as ATITool that allows selection of settings much higher than this, we are confident that the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 could have done even better. As we're sure many of us will already know, the Radeon HD 4870 regardless of manufacturer is one great card. While many will argue that it's little brother, the Radeon HD 4850 can do the job just as well with a little bit of overclocking.

The GDDR5 memory found only on the Radeon HD 4870 allowed us to push the overclocking slider all the way to the edge without even having to test for stability. This was also true for the core clock speed which showed no signs of visual corruption or other artifacting when running the GPU at speeds approaching 800MHz. Benchmarking the Radeon HD 4870 against the likes of GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 gave a mixed bag of results with the Radeon HD 4870 taking the lead in a select few games, while locking horns with the GeForce GTX 260 in others and even in Crysis it managed to do well at high resolutions.

Thanks to PowerColor's no-frills approach to packaging and accessories, the Radeon HD 4870 also came in at around $40 cheaper than the GeForce GTX 260, despite NVIDIA's heavy price cuts and managed to score well on our overall cost per frame scale. In summary, the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 manages to combine excellent performance along with a price that is fairly easy to swallow. Even with the beastly Radeon HD 4870 X2 right around the corner, this card is set to be a market favorite for a long time to come.