The Radeon 4850 took the world by storm not too long ago late last month and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 was quick to follow. Unfortunately our review sample was a few days late and the review of two new AMD processors happened the Tuesday after we received them so we're a little late to the review but still here with helpful information.

The RV770 is manufactured on a 55nm manufacturing process as was the Radeon 3000 series and the 4870 sports about 965 million transistors. The card doesn't add much in way of new features from the 3870 still supporting DX 10.1, CSAA, Crossfire, and more although one new addition is the inclusion of the next-gen video decoder, the UVD2. The 4870 sports a 750MHz core speed from the 625MHz of the 4850, it still boasts 512MB of RAM but this time it's super high bandwidth GDDR5 as opposed to GDDR3 which it uses to over come the 256-bit memory interface. The 4870 has a 160W TDP and requires two 6-pin PCI-Express connectors in order to function and thus with SLI you'll need 4 6-pin PCI-E power adapters so keep in mind if you do go for this card. It is also dual slot and doesn't get quite as hot as the Radeon HD 4850 but definitely gets up there. Perhaps most impressive of the 4000 series is that the number of stream processors has bolted to 800 from 320 from the 3000 and 2000 series more than doubling overall and allowing for huge gains.

The MSRP for the Radeon HD 4870 is $299 and you can get it for at Amazon and the Radeon HD 4850 for $192.

# 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
# PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
# 256-bit GDDR3/4/5 memory interface
# Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support

* Shader Model 4.1
* 32-bit floating point texture filtering
* Indexed cube map arrays
* Independent blend modes per render target
* Pixel coverage sample masking
* Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
* Gather4 texture fetching

# Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

* 800 stream processing units
o Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
o Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
o Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
* 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
* Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
* Shader instruction and constant caches
* Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
* Up to 128 textures per pixel
* Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
* DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
* High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
* Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
* Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
* Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
* Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
* Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
* Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
* Accelerated physics processing

# Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

* High performance vertex cache
* Programmable tessellation unit
* Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
* Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

# Anti-aliasing features

* Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
* Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
* Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
* Gamma correct
* Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
* All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

# Texture filtering features

* 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
* 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
* sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
* Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
* Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
* Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

# OpenGL 2.0 support
# ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform6

* Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
o High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video
o Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
o DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
o Support for BD-Live certified applications
* Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
* Accelerated video transcoding & encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
* ATI Avivo Video Post Processor6
o Color space conversion
o Chroma subsampling format conversion
o Horizontal and vertical scaling
o Gamma correction
o Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
o Detail enhancement
o Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
o Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
o Bad edit correction
o Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)
o Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
* Two independent display controllers
o Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
o Full 30-bit display processing
o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
o Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
o Fast, glitch-free mode switching
o Hardware cursor
* Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
o Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
o Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
* Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
o Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15362
* DisplayPort output support
o 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
* HDMI output support
o All display resolutions up to 1920x10802
o Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS, DTS-HD & Dolby True-HD4, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
* Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
o Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
o Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
o Underscan and overscan compensation
* Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
* VGA mode support on all display outputs

# ATI PowerPlay™ Technology5

* Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
* Performance-on-Demand
o Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
o Clock and memory speed throttling
o Voltage switching
o Dynamic clock gating
o Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required

# ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology

* Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
* Integrated compositing engine
* High performance dual channel bridge interconnect1

Our first impression of this card in the limited time we had is that it is amazing ATI put so much power into a single slot card. It does appear to run very hot, at around 155 degrees Fahrenheit by our initial tests but it is a single slot card and we can say the fastest single slot card on the market. A bigger heatsink/fan could have helped but it seems to be quite a powerful package for an amazing price.

 
After numerous hurdles in getting their 2900 line of cards out, in finally catching up to Nvidia in getting a DX10 card out even if it was one that was too hot and didn't perform well, ATI managed a significant comeback late last year with the 3000 Radeon series of cards especially the 3870X2, 3870, and 3850. Performance increased dramatically able to compete with Nvidia, price, and power consumption. But Nvidia has come back first with the 9800 GTX then the incredibly expensive GTX 280. And what does AMD have to bounce right back but the brand new Radeon HD 4850 launching today and in a few weeks the Radeon HD 48 4870 which should topple the GeForce 9800 GTX.

Below is the shot of the actual card we used from our friends at Visiontek.  We received two cards from the trip to the launch in San Francisco and some other goodies have since arrived in Austin.  Or across town at least.

Time is one thing that is not on our side as ATI pushed the NDA expiration ahead a week as cards have already started to flood the channel making the time for the review very tight. We'll cut straight to the chase here and give you the specs. The gist of it is this is a second generation 55nm Radeon product and the 4000 series brings some amazing gains in stream processor count and efficiency.

The MSRP for the Radeon HD 4850 will be $199.

956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3/GDDR5 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
800 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixels
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4 or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Gamma correct
Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2)
Enabling hardware decode acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
Dual stream playback (or Picture-in-picture)
Hardware MPEG-1, and DivX video decode acceleration
Motion compensation and IDCT
ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
New enhanced DVD upconversion to HD new!
New automatic and dynamic contrast adjustment new!
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated DVI display outputs
Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)3
Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)3
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content4
Two integrated 400MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363
DisplayPort™ output support
Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x1600
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10803
Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™
Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
Performance-on-Demand
Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
Clock and memory speed throttling
Voltage switching
Dynamic clock gating
Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel bridge interconnect5

Our first impression of this card in the limited time we had is that it is amazing ATI put so much power into a single slot card. It does appear to run very hot, at around 155 degrees Fahrenheit by our initial tests but it is a single slot card and we can say the fastest single slot card on the market. A bigger heatsink/fan could have helped but it seems to be quite a powerful package for an amazing price.

 
Nvidia came out with the GeForce 9800 GTX series of cards recently and as usual with Nvidia's lineup now that they've been out for some time we start to see cards from other manufacturers that give it something of a twist. One of these cards is Foxconn's GeForce 9800 GTX OC740/2280 which we'll be looking at today.

Here are the specifications.

GPU： NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
Core： G92
CoreClock： 740MHz
Pixel Pipeline： 128 Stream Processors
Vertex Pipeline： 128 Stream Processors
RAMDACs： 400MHz
Memory Type： GDDR3
Memory Size： 512MB
Memory Clock： 2280MHz
Memory Interface： 256bit
Graphics Bus Technology： PCI Express 2.0
Cooler： Fansink
Connectors： Dual Dual-Link DVI + HDTV_Out
Special Features： PCI Express 2.0
NVIDIA® SLI™ Support
Dual Dual-Link DVI Support
HDTV Out Support

The card from the outside looks like a standard GeForce 9800 GTX reference video card with the shiny, Darth Vader's helmet-like shroud that covers the card and the standard two DVI-outputs, golden fingers, and two PCI-Express connectors. However on the inside there are some differences, the most major one being that the card is overclocked out of the box. The GPU is clocked 55MHz more than the standard clock of 685MHz and the RAM is up to 2280MHz from 2200MHz. This is a nice bonus from Foxconn of not having to work with overclocking utilities or voiding your warranty but giving you a speed boost over the normal default speed. Also the Foxconn card features Japanese solid state capacitors which extend the lifespan over normal capacitors and also run cooler which is a great bonus. More information can be found at Foxconn's website.

The hardware bundle is fairly standard including two PCI-E molex power adapters, two DVI-to-VGA adapters, and an HDTV dongle. The software bundle features DriveClone software and Virtual Drive software in addition to of course drivers and a manual.

The core is based off the G94 series and is built on a 65nm manufacturing process which lowers heat and reduces cost significantly. It also features onboard HD decoding of such codecs as H.264 to lower CPU usage, full DirectX10 support (though no DX 10.1)

Dual GPUs together on a single card haven't always been smooth sailing in the past. Hot, power hungry, incompatible with SLI at times and more annoying than helpful at times. That all changed though when ATI released a new type of dual GPU card with the Radeon HD 3870X2 which combined two cards onto one PCB and solved many of the issues from the past. We've taken a look at ATI's card previously and now we have an overclocked version to look at with Visiontek's Radeon HD 3870X2 Overclocked Edition.

The card comes packaged in a rectangular box which is just the right size for a card this large, meaning not unnecessarily big. Rectangular in shape it features Call of Juarez on the box although we didn't see it in our bundle. Inside the card is packed nicely in Styrofoam with a fairly typical hardware bundle. DVI-to-VGA adapter, DVI-to-HDMI adapter, molex to PCI-Express power adapter, HDTV cable, and S-video cable. No extra software bundle is included.

Taking the card out of the box it is pretty heavy though not as large a card as the GeForce 9800 GTX. Visiontek have upped the ante with the overclocked card by putting a huge copper heatsink over the entire card with heatpipes and two large fans on both GPUs also enshrouded in copper heatsinks. Very meaty cooling solution. Thanks to all of this extra cooling the card is overclocked out of the box to 840MHz core clock speed and memory at 960MHz. This is 15MHz more than the standard core speed of a 3870X2 and 60MHz more for the memory.

The 3870X2 requires two PCI-Express 6-pin connectors which is actually better than the single 2900XT graphics card. Not only that but it features an amazing four DVI-Outputs so you should be more than covered for many spare monitors.

Once again we'll do a quick refresh of the RV670 GPU the cards are based on. Basically it they shrunk the die size of the 2900XT from 80nm to 55nm which got ride of the major problems of heat and power consumption. Additionally the memory bus was cut down from 512-bit to 256-bit with no performance penalty and in fact increased performance. 320 stream processors are still onboard and an upgrade is also there with the UVD (Universal Video Decoder) for your HD decoding, CPU offloading, pleasure. And let's not forget DirectX 10.1 support which Nvidia has yet to release a card which supports the next iteration of DX.

Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX was a high-mark for both the company and for the graphics industry launching DirectX10 with a bang in regards to performance with one of the biggest leaps we've seen in sometime. The bad news is that was back in November of 2006 and Nvidia didn't launch the follow-up until last month. The good news is it is out now and for much less than the $600 price tag or so the 8800 GTX launched with. Let's take a look at one from Asus, the EN9800GTX.

As you might expect Nvidia's 9800 GTX has a lot in common with all the recent cards they've released in that it is based off the G92 core that the 8800 GT, 8800 GTS 512MB, and more recent 9600 GT all share. To sum it up quickly the major difference between this and the G80 core the previous generation of DX10 cards were based on is the die shrink to 65nm to cut down on die size, costs, and power consumption. It features 128 shaders with a default clock speed of 675MHz for the core and 1.69GHz for the shaders with a 2.2GHz memory clock speed with 512MB of RAM using a 256-bit memory bus. This might seem a little odd to some people who know the GeForce 8800 GTX specs as that card featured 768MB of RAM with a 384-bit memory interface, so higher in regards to the GeForce 9800 GTX. That said there were more than likely some efficiency issues in regards to texture management which have been resolved with better drivers and revised hardware but it still seems on paper to be one of the few times a newer product has lower specs than the previous generation. ATI also did this with their Radeon 3870 moving from a 512-bit memory interface to 256-bit and that card was faster than the 2900 XT. The stream processor number holds steady at 128 though the clock speed is 100MHz faster than the default of the GeForce 8800 GTX which was 575MHz compared to 675MHz.
 

A large, dark, plastic shroud covers the entire card with a Darth Vader's helmet sort of look. The fan is a little smaller than on the 9800 GTX and is very quiet. The card naturally works in SLI and also is one of the only two cards that will work in hybrid SLI with 780a/750a/730a chipsets which is a nice extra bonus. This can save quite a bit of power if you happen to have one of the newer boards that support it.

The hardware bundle consists of a DVI-to-VGA adapter, D-Sub adapter, S-Video cable, and a new and improved leather CD wallet from Asus. This one is made of much finer leather and better construction, though still is low on the amount of CDs/DVDs it can hold. No hardware bundle unfortunately.

Specifications:
Graphics Engine: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
Bus Standard: PCI Express 2.0
Video Memory: DDR3 512MB
Engine Clock: 675 MHz
Shader Clock: 1.688 GHz
Memory Clock: 2.2 GHz ( 1.1 GHz DDR3 )
RAMDAC: 400MHz
Memory Interface: 256-bit
CRT Max Resolution: 2048 x 1536
DVI Max Resolution: 3840 x 2400
D-Sub Output: Yes x 1 (via DVI to D-Sub adaptor x 1 )
DVI Output: Yes x 2
HDTV Output (YPbPr): Yes
HDCP Support: Yes
TV Output: Yes (YPbPr to S-Video and Composite)
Adaptor/Cable bundled: 1 x DVI to D-Sub adaptor
1 x HDTV-out cable
1 x Power cable
Software Bundled
ASUS Utilities & Driver
Note
Special bundled: CD Leather Wallet
The card size is 4.376 inches x 10.5 inches