ATI shocked the hardware community with their release of the Radeon HD 4800 series. And shifting their focus away from the $600 segment, ATI brought high performance within reach of the general public for half the price that was customary just two months ago. NVIDIA was caught so unaware by the Radeon HD 4800 series that they had to do some across the board price cutting to just to keep up. Aside from competition, it shows that ATI and NVIDIA are starting to recognize that most of us who would like to buy a $600 card, only about a small percentage actually can and do. Cutting that price premium in half opens these products up to a significantly larger audience. - Overclocker Cafe

VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 GDDR5 Cool Card Review

VisionTek has it's NVIDIA killer on store shelves as well as everyone else right now. The Radeon HD 4870 card is described as offering the best bang for your high performance dollar on the street. Packing a 750MHz GPU clock and half a gigabyte of GDDR5 memory the Radeon HD 4870 brings a lot of pixel pushing power to the table for under $300. Today, VisionTek has seen fit to send over their Radeon HD 4870 for us to have some direct time with and see what it offers. Keeping the extras to a minimum, VisionTek is looking to offer their Radeon HD 4870 at a slightly lower price point that other ATI partners.

The VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 is a reference design board. At present, there is only one Radeon HD 4870 that Visiontek makes but we fully expect to see an overclocked version with a high output cooler strapped on in the near future. For now though, we find a dual slot solution with an oversized cooler and a red tinted acrylic shroud wrapping that assembly. Native CrossFireX as you can see from the dual connection posts. Want to double your fun? Try two of these boys. Each CrossFireX card comes with one bridge cable to connect the cards so with two cards you have the requisite two cables.

The ATI reference design calls for 750MHz on the core and a 3600MHz on the GDDR5 memory clock. Using the Catalyst Overdrive panel we played around until we found the stable ceiling of our test card. Playing hit and miss of finding the sweet spot we all love so much. We found a maximum overclock of 780MHz and 4280MHz on the core and memory respectively. The Radeon HD 4870 is a fine card and VisionTek brings it to market for less than its competitors. As we have seen in Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, the Radeon HD 4800 series holds its ground very well and can compete the GeForce GTX 260 series.

The Radeon HD 4870 card brings Blu-ray and the option of running two cards in CrossFireX to the table at a price that isn't frightening. ATI has scored a big hit here and deserves all the accolades it is now getting. Raw muscle is here in plenty as is image quality. Priced at $285, the VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 is a hard card to say no to for your next upgrade. We think the only thing that may be more tempting would be a pair of Radeon HD 4850 cards running in CrossFireX for $100 more. Other than that, a worth while product well worth consideration for your next upgrade.