ATi shocked the hardware community with their release of the Radeon HD4800 series.  Shifting their focus away from the $600 segment (a small retail market to be sure), 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 unawares by the HD4800 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 of the 100% of us who would like to buy a $600 card, only about 1% actually can and do.  Cutting that price premium in half opens these products up to a significantly larger audience.

Visiontek has it's NVidia killer on store shelves as well as everyone else right now.  The Radeon HD4870 is described as offering the best bang for your high performance dollar on the street.  Packing a 750MHz GPU clock and half a gig of GDDR5 memory the HD4870 brings a lot of pixel pushing power to the table for under $300.  Today, Visiontek has seen fit to send over their HD4870 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 HD4870 at a slightly lower price point that other ATi partners.  Let's jump right in with the white paper.

Specifications

• Graphics Engine: Radeon HD4870

• Interface: PCI-Express 2.0

• Engine Clock: 750MHz

• Memory Clock: 3.6GHz

• Memory Type/Size: GDDR5/512MB

• Memory Interface: 256-bit

• Stream Processing Units: 800

• 24x Custom Filter Anti Aliasing (CFAA) and high performance Anisotropic Filtering

• Max Resolution: 2560x1600

• VGA Output: Yes with adapter

• TV-Out: DVI x 2 / Composite Out

• HDMI Support: HDMI with 7.1 surround audio

• HDCP Support: Yes

• Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for Blue-Ray and HD Movies

• Supports full HD 1080p playback

• Native CrossfireX support

• DirectX 10.1 Ready

• Lifetime warranty

What you get

As we mentioned in the introduction, Visiontek has a barebones package with their HD4870.  Cutting out the extra demos and games saves Joe User some cash at the checkout counter.  Visiontek's HD4870 is available now with a street price of $285, some $15 below the average.  Included with the Visiontek HD4870 is a DVI to VGA adapter, DVI to HDMI adapter that supports audio and video, CrossfireX bridge cable, S-Video composite adapter, Component HDTV connection, Manuals and Driver disk.  So while you get the necessaries you need you don't end up paying for swag you don't.

NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Temperature, Sound, Test Bed
Pg 4 - Benchmarks
Pg 5 - Image Quality, Overclocking, Conclusion