With the holiday season in full swing it's coming down to crunch time for those looking to round out or fulfill their wish lists. In the event that you're done looking for gifts this Christmas season it's still a great time to purchase, cause nearly anything technology related is going to be on sale trying to draw customers in. With the media daily reporting doom and gloom for retailers this seems to be a great time to buy as they are desperate for sales. With that in mind, we decided to take a couple of the very best bang for the buck cards on the market and pit them against each other. Today we are taking look at one of the best cards for gaming performance, the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 1GB edition. - Legit Reviews

Diamond Radeon HD 4870 CrossFireX Edition Review

We have covered the Radeon HD 4870 512MB version of this card and saw that it was a stellar performer and was a great step in the right direction for ATI. The only problem with a Radeon HD 4870 512MB is that at higher resolutions and with the eye candy cranked up, the smallish frame buffer starts to limit what the card can do and quickly succumbs to its competition, the GeForce GTX 260 series. In order to compete at higher resolutions and eye candy levels, Diamond has outfitted a run of the mill Radeon HD 4870 with an additional 512MB to bring the total to 1GB of video memory, where it should have been from the start.

This makes the Radeon HD 4870 1GB the only relevant video card outside of the GeForce GTX 280 that has a full 1GB frame buffer dedicated to a GPU. We say relevant because we have seen boards with a 1GB frame buffer before that made almost no difference at all. Lurking under the red heatsink and fan combo, you've got the Radeon HD 4870 core clocked at 750MHz, while the GDDR5 memory is clocked at 3600MHz. And as far as the overclocking goes, with an increase of just 40MHz core speed and 200MHz on the memory we aren't going break any performance records, but a free bump in performance is always great.

From our testing we can see that the Diamond RadeoN HD 4870 1GB came to play. With NVIDIA releasing their big bang drivers we saw a substantial increase in performance. ATI has answered back and we the customers are the ones who benefit the most from the increases in performance and competition. One thing to keep in mind is that this is a small set of games and, outside of our test suite, performance will slightly favor either the NVIDIA card or the ATI card. Calling one or the other the clear winner based on performance is impossible, so it really comes down to things like pricing, drivers, and heat and/or noise.

The pricing for the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 1GB is quite good. It seems these cards are selling well and the only e-tailor we can find with it in stock at the moment has got it is priced at $309. Newegg does carry the card and prices it at $275. All of the other Radeon HD 4870 1GB listed at Newegg do have a mail-in rebate bringing the price down. Pricing for the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 puts it at $249, so there is an advantage on the price for the NVIDIA card. On the side where ATI always was a bit less good, we have to say they really have improved though under load the cooling solution still tends to get a bit noisy.

Now if you are planning to utilize your GPU to speed up video encoding the price difference could be made up from the recent inclusion of the ATI Avivo video converter as you will need to purchase additional software to make use of the NVIDIA GPU. Either way you cut it, you're getting one very good gaming card for not a lot out of pocket.