Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB video card review

Over the last couple of weeks we've taken a look at a couple of Radeon HD 4850-based parts (with more on the way), both of which impressed us with their price/performance ratio in a way that we haven't really seen since the launch of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT, while also offering up a mightily impressive feature set to complement it.

Today, we move up a notch in both pricing and performance terms, as we take our first look at the Radeon HD 4870 courtesy of Sapphire's reference-based offering.  In essence, this particular SKU features the same core architecture, but with higher clock speeds and a massive increase in memory bandwidth - With competition heating up due to some massive price drops from NVIDIA in recent weeks, can this particular part continue to compete in its segment of the cut-throat graphics market?  It's about time we take a look and find out.