Two leading companies which have been long-time ATI-based add-in board partners are Diamond Multimedia and VisionTek – both have a solid track record of releasing quality products and done a good job of cementing their respective brands as ones of top-shelf ones to seek out from gamers and PC enthusiasts.

One thing that all end-users have in common is their continual need and desire for faster video cards at prices that won’t bankrupt them and it seems – for now – AMD is truly answered their plight with its current generation of GPUs.

As you’ll see in the benchmarks – the only issue I have with any of the 4870’s right now is that you can get two 4850’s for the same price and have better performance – this is a pricing issue that ATI will need to resolve soon as to not compete against itself so much.

For now, the 4870 will highly appeal to those who only have a single PCI-E slot and/or don’t want two cards for some reason as it offers the best-in-class single-GPU performance going right now.

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