Do these really have an unlocked shader core now? That would really open up potential of this card.

ATIs triumphant return to the market? or another budget product unable to take the crown? I'm betting it'l put the 9800GTX in its place, and if it can hit the estimated MSRP of $299 This will be the card to use at least until the G92 shrink. By the same margine, the 4870X2 will put the 9800GX2 in its place. or so I hope, ATI needs a profitable product!!

Shaders no longer locked to the core ? Cheers .

Shaders no longer locked is not what the HD series needed, but more texture units.
Altough the G92 has up to 64 TUs, the Hd 4870 achieve 38,8% more texture filling than the 8800 Ultra, wich is the fastest single GPU yet.
Lets hope for the best.

GDDR5.....intersting, wonder how it perform compare to GDDR4/GDDR3

Well in a nutshell, GDDR5 offers a modest increase in performance over GDDR4 and a fairly significant increase in performance over GDDR3. The really big change with it is that it uses significantly less power, one of the Achilles Heels of todays GPU's. Its in the range of 30-40% less power for the memory.
Here's some more info if you want it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDDR5

I believe the GPU guys (whos running the db these days?) are mistaken. The Shader and core clock will still be one to one. That said, on TSMCs 55nm process, the HD3870 could easily crack 1000MHz.

3870MHz!!!. nvidia's upcoming cards shouldn't have gddr3 anymore.

@jugger - Most games mainly require shader horsepower , often the need
for shaders and texture fill rate is at 5:1 or 7:1 ... if not higher .
@MrWizard6600 - a number of sites have already posted info about the shaders running at 1.05 Ghz while core remains at 850 Mhz .

This card has nearly double the shader operations of the HD 2900 XT ... I wonder if it's going to be put in use .

Maybe this card will be SuperScalar MADD X4 to replace the SuperScalar MADD X5, so it will be more efficient

What you just posted made virtually no sense to me , lol .

I'm pretty certain it will be the Superscalar MADDx5 architecture all over again , all signs point to that ( the riddiculous amount of shader processors for a start ) .

Should be an interesting card. I'm eager to find out about the impact of GDDR5 and how much power this baby consumes.

@fork - I doubt it'll make a huge impact...

wyz... why would it do 4 ops/clock instead of 5? Why would that make it so much more efficient?

c'mon man...

thefork- What the rumors say is that the 4870 should be around the 150w point, and the 4850 around 110w. Apparently ATI is shooting for 150w envelope, so that should give the actual card some decent overclocking headroom. So overclocked you can probably expect a good bit more power usage.

So much for the 27k texture fill rate then .

ati should increase the TMUs and the ROPs rather than the shader processors. is there any review for this product yet?

i just noticed the only thing they increased is the tmus but still falls short nvidia still has more tmus and rops

Extra ROPs are somewhat unnecessary on ATi cards , considering they do all the AA with their shader processors , while nVidia's cards do them with ROPs .
16 ROPs is more than enough for these things .

Fud says thats fixd.

Then I hope 16 ROPs will be enough .

TGDaily reports 4870 do have a TDP of 225W. Now this is getting confusing.

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37881-135.html

You need to update the spec's on these cards... Example: The 4870/4850 cards actually have 800 shaders... 4870 has 1200 GFLOPS and 4850 1000 GFLOPS... This will make a BIG difference in the final comparisons to other cards... http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7805&Itemid=34
http://www.nordichardware.com/news,7841.html

First off, the 4870 doesn't have a 225W TDP, that's been misconstrued by the writers of TGdaily. Just because a card has the ability to draw a certain amount of power, it certainly does not mean that it does draw that amount of power. It's just a bit of overhead in case the card does need the power (i.e. some batches might need higher voltages, and it allows for OEM overclocks) If I remember rightly, the TDP is the amount of heat the heatsink needs to dissipate in Watts and is only a rough indication of power draw.

Secondly: It's seeming more and more likely RV770 has 800 shaders, a couple of sites are showing what appear to be AMD leaks with references to 800 stream processors, which is more than can be said for the 480/unlocked shader clock rumour.

225W ?!? I hope that's not true ... or it wont really need that much electricity .
This is getting really confusing ... can't wait until the 23rd of June aswell as the 17th of June , so we'd get some clarification in things .

As for the shader processors... I'm 90% sure they have 800 shader processors and not 480 .

All of the posts made here are made by members of the site... O_O .

@Radiator: You do realize that's insane, right?
The last batch had 320. It only makes sense for this one to have 480. 800 is far too much.

its been all but confirmed that it has 800sp's ati planted the story about it having 480 and iv personally seen many GPU-Z screenshots saying 800 unified shaders

well i seen the website of fx said it has 800 and xtremesystems review, if its gonna be as fast as the 280 gtx it better have 800 to keep up

Well you do realise that 90% of the previewers or reviewers or whatever say that these things have 800 shader processors , right ?

And considering nVidia's heater has 240 shader processors , it only makes sense , that this thing has 160x5 .

Please change this to 800SPs and core shader clock to 750 MHz. There is no separate shader clock.

yep 800 i found this and i think its true since i seen 4850 reviews

http://en.hardspell.com/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=3413

600000 shader operations/sec . That's a 2.52x increase in shader horsepower over the HD 2900 XT .
@andrew2004gto - The HD 4870X2 is going to compete with the GTX280 and not the HD 4870 .
The GTX280 will most likely get stomped by the HD 4870X2 ( if the drivers are good enough on release ) .
The HD 4870 is going to compete with the GTX260 , as far as I know .

yea your right but i was very surprise at how the 4850 performed, i wonder if driver updates will make it faster

Well , I was rather pleasantly supprised on how the HD 4850 performed ... and on the RV770 core , apparently , the core clock is supposed to play a larger role performance-wise .

Heres to hopeing ATI can FINALLY AND AT LAST get the drivers right for these cards. Cuase the 3870 X2 looks so much more powerful than it performes. Such a sad story, and unforchanet.

I mean I miss the day when ATI was more powerful, IE my REALLY OLD 9800 All in wonder, love that card.

Hmmm... 4870 punches above its own weight as what Anandtech said.

Well , the HD 3870X2 has two GPUs on it , while both , the HD 4870 and the HD 4850 have merely 1 GPU on them .

Apparently where CF actually works , it scales insanely well on these cards .
And a HD 4870 CF setup kills and rapes the GTX280 .

...kills and rapes? Not quite. It is about even: better in some things, not as good in others. Given that, at least right now, the prices on the two (2x4870/1x280) are similar, it's a wash.

Yes, kills and rapes, very much. Even 1 4870 nearly comes close to the 280, 2 4870's in CF kill and yes...rape! And you still save 30 bucks (GTX 280=$650,2 HD 4870=$620)

I mean where CF setups PROPERLY work .

Guys, I'm a total ATI whore... but, seriously, mano-y-mano, the 280 will beat the hell out of the 4870. Period. The 4870 has a much better price/performance ratio, and a pair of them in CF would beat a 280 every time if we lived in some utopian world where drivers were perfect. A pair of 4850s in the same utopia are just about equal with a 280.

I agree the 280 will beat the 4870, but 4870 wasnt built to compete 280, 4870 was going up against 260, 4870x2 is supposed to be their top high end single vga being pre-pared against something nvidia is coming out as faster than 280, EX: 280x2 . and 4850x2 is following as 2nd high end. that kills 280. :)

GTX280 GX2 ... that would eat 400-450W , and it would beat the HD 4870 X2 .
I remember , when the 6600 GT came out at first , it was around 250 USD , if I'm not mistaken... now this thing is being sold for 254 USD . :)

Too bad it costs 350 USD if you buy it from a local store here .
Then again , the GTX260 costs about 450 USD and GTX280 costs about 650 USD .
Why the hell do they take it that 1 euro = 1 USD ?

Awesome card, really makes the GTX260 look like Child's play.

Has anyone attempted to mount an after-market cooler & heat sink to this for better OC and temp?

The HR-03 GT should work rather well (and would cost a ton aswell) ... I haven't mounted one myself , because I simply don't have this card , nor a PC with what I could use ths card with . Also , the accelero S1 is really good... but it doesn't have enough heatsinks for it's memory chips . So there should be a revision if it sooner or later .

I've heard that people got good results with DuOrbs and VF1000's

Not sure about HR-03GT's though

The VF1000 isn't nearly as good , as the HR-03GT or the Accelero S1 , though .
The stock cooler itself is rather good - you just have to increase the speed of it , because the default is at 22% only .
At 35-40% it's still rather quiet and the temps should drop by a LOT .

Does this card work on a PCI-E 1.1/X16 slot???

if so how much is effected(decrease in performance etc.)

@rammunition - it'll work and it wont get a decrease in performance due to a slower PCI-e bus .
However , a lousy CPU can bottleneck it .
@McArthur - the VF1000 is decent , but not as good as the S1 or HR-03 GT .

great card and really does amazing. graphics alone on 3dmark03 went from 8600gts to this car and score went up 23000 points. Stock fan with fan fix to 50% idles me at 42c and barely cracks 50c under load.

I currently own this card, a Visiontek, im a huge fan of it and i have OC'ed it amazingly. Runs all my games at highest possible performance.

Is this currently the card with best value for money?
If not please post your thoughts.

I bought the 8800 GT 10 months ago, and was very satisfied. I somehow don't want to support Nvidia's weird naming schemes and clinging to their G92 or 65nm process.

Currently this card is has probably the best value for the cost... especially the 1GB version , if you play at higher resolutions ... this is one of the few cards , where 512MB of vRAM is actually a limitation in a couple of games .

@ Radiator

1GB of vRam in games is a must now with GTA4 released

@Mrstew

GTA4 is slow because it's poorly optimized

I get the feeling that the only difference between this card and the 3870 is it's got more SP's crammed into it...And it's more inefficient.

@mrstew GTA4 is HORRIBLY optimized , it's got MASSIVE memory leaks even 4 GB of RAM and 1GB of vRAM fills up quickly and then it starts eating your harddrive . And a quadcore is a must for it aswell . I wish they'd re-release GTA4 , because it's one horrible screwup for PC gaming , and it's a "high profile" game so to speak , so I wonder what the BLOODY HELL did they do with all that time .
@Appule - that's what you think .

@Appule:

Wait, what? Have you bothered to look at any benchmarks? ATI did some serious improvement with this generation.

I'm kinda of confused... Whats the required PSU to run this card...??? I have a 550w PSU is that enough...???

Specs without the card:

OS: Vista

Memory: 3g

Processor : Intel core 2 duo 2.14mh

GPU : X1950pro ( to be replaced by the Hd4870)

The version I'm going to get is the x2 core 512mb one. Thanks

Is 4870 a Full HD card?

@KnowNothing: Could you clarify that? It will run HDMI and do hd decoding if that's what you're wondering.

Questions are much more likely to be answered in the forum. If you're still checking this page after so much time then you might want to go there instead.