At anywhere between £187 and £200, including VAT, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB appears to represent pretty good value for money. It’s not only cheaper (and better-performing) than the various GeForce GTX 260+ cards on the market, but it’s also not that much more expensive than the pre-overclocked GeForce GTX 260s out there as well. In most scenarios, it’s actually not too far behind Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280 – a card that costs around £80 more.

When you compare it to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which retails for around £170 these days, you still appear to be getting a good buy as well. It costs around eight percent more and in some circumstances you’re getting performance increases much bigger than that, even at 1,920 x 1,200 – the screen resolution this card looks to be targeting. Of course, there are scenarios where there will be little-to-no benefit, but they’re to be expected anyway – not all games are completely GPU bound and in those games you’ll see very little benefit from a faster graphics card, period.

Even at 1,680 x 1,050, there are scenarios—like in Crysis—where the additional memory delivers higher frame rates and with most of this year’s blockbuster releases still to come, we’d argue that the Radeon HD 4870 1GB will become even more relevant at this resolution as well, as graphics demands are likely to increase with games like Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge right on the horizon.

In short, if you like playing games with lots of AA turned on, you’ll love the Radeon HD 4870 1GB.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...-hd-4870-1gb/1