AMD unleashes Radeon HD 4870 - new price/performance king
Written by Andreas G 26 June 2008 22:50

AMD and NVIDIA have been taking turns in launching new graphics cards over the last few weeks. It's been such a back and forth journey that many sites haven't had time to complete their reviews, which means that there are still a lot of reviews to expect. After NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX series and AMD launched the first card of the Radeon HD 4800 series with Radeon HD 4850, we've now come to the next big launch, after NVIDIA sneaked out GeForce 9800GTX+. It's a new flagship for AMD/ATI, and it's called Radeon HD 4870.

RV770 cores in the nude

Radeon HD 4870 uses the same RV770 core as the smaller sibling, Radeon HD 4850, but the clock frequency has been bumped up a bit from 625MHz to 750MHz. To further emphasize that the two cards are geared toward two different segments, AMD has chosen to use all new GDDR5 memory chips with Radeon HD 4870. This gives Radeon HD 4870 twice the memory bandwidth of its sibling, even though both of them use a 256 bit wide memory bus.

Radeon HD 4870 may be AMD's flagship, but it's still considerably cheaper than both of the GeForce GTX cards. An indication, if any, that AMD is not targeting the same consumers, but is maintaining its focus on price/performance.

Even though the focus is on making a mainstream products, the performance of the new Radeon HD 4800 series is anything but poor. We saw it in the Radeon HD 4850 reviews, and we suspected that the doubled memory bandwidth would do RV770 much good. The first reviews of Radeon HD 4870 shows AMD that AMD has hit the sweetspot with its prices and even if NVIDIA is sitting on the single-GPU throne it doesn't seem like AMD cares, and it does look like RV770 can threaten the G200 in some benchmarks.

Below are a couple of Radeon HD 4870 reviews;

:: Anandtech :: HotHardware :: Elite Bastards :: Ars Technica :: Hardware Canucks :: MadBoxPC :: LegitReviews :: TechReport ::

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