Just a few weeks ago, the Radeon HD 4850 card was released and with it came a huge boost of performance for the price. The Radeon HD 4870 edition is the high-end version of the RV770 series of GPU released from AMD. We have the Sapphire version which is actually folowing the reference design to the letter both from the looks as the clock settings. This is actually just common as ATI has just recently allowed their partners to come with non default versions which can have a different cooling solution as well as pre-overclocked speeds. Yeah, on that aspect ATI is still cautious, and which is quite different when comparing to the NVIDIA mindset which is more open to special versions. - ASE Labs

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Cool Board Design Review

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 card comes in the standard box with black and red accents. The girl on the box is a Tomb Raiderish looking girl. Sex sells, it's everywhere. Still not seen on the Sapphire box is Linux support which has been included since the release of the Radeon HD 4800 series. Now in relation to the Radeon HD 4850, this card is basically the same with a different core speed and much faster memory. The memory itself is GDDR5 for the high-end version, a brand new memory technology which scales much better by sacrificing latency for speed, though having more bandwidth.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 is a dual slot cooling design. The reason for this is due to the card's core and memory speeds. At 160W, the core pumps out heat and you'll burn your finger if you touch the back side of the card with it. The cooler itself spins very loudly on first boot and then spins down. We have yet to hear it be very loud when in use since my system is well ventilated. The dual slot cooler is painful if you have a small case, but since this card is targeted at the enthusiast community, it probably won't matter to the target market. Even so, you can put a staggering four of these into CrossFire which is pretty insane.

The card costs about $285 at the time of this article and since this card is targeted to the enthusiast, it is a great price for the performance. Let's talk about where the card stands. The previous Radeon HD 4850 was a good mainstream card for performance and the price point was tough to beat. We still think the Radeon HD 4850 is the better price to performance winner, but that isn't the point of the Radeon HD 4870. We want raw performance. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 delivers that raw performance and allows you to run at some extremely high resolutions with full anti-aliasing settings and the quality turned up a notch.

Gamers looking to buy a card should look no further. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 is as good as it gets for now. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be pretty impressive, but we doubt it will be even close to this price point. The Radeon HD 4870 is our choice for a performance video card.