In an official announcement, ATI said that the days of the 8800GT proving to be the best possible cost effective solution are numbered. Well, they have proved this with their latest flagship offering, the HD 4870, which is based on the revolutionary RV770 chipset. The combination of faster memory and increments in texture units (from 16 to 40) and shaders (from 320 to 800) has played an important role in the fightback of the Radeons. This is their first GPU that incorporates GDDR5 type memory, and has a core clock frequency of 750 MHz and a memory clock frequency of 1800 MHz. It is faster than the GTX 260, and offers that stunning amount of perform- ance at almost ¾ of the price of the GTX 260. In 3Dmark06, it scored an amazing 16000 marks. In Crysis, it performed really well with an average FPS of about 45 fps and in UT 3 too it gave us 157 fps.

This could have been a clear winner only if it had consumed less power and if there had been no heating issues. But despite that, this one is a superb offering from ATI that will force the GPU wars up.

ATi Radeon HD 4870 Rs 18,000	Performance Coolness
Specs RV770 based chipset, 512 MB GDDR5, 750 MHz core clock speed, 1.8 MHz memory clock speed,  256 bit memory bus, DX 10.1, HDCP ready, Crossfire Ready, dual DVI, HDTV ready	Pros Performance, low cost Cons Gets extremely hot, power hungry Sold by AMD India Tel: 022- 40850772 Verdict