Despite NVIDIA’s efforts, ATI graphic chips continue to set the bar for today’s top-performing add-in board solutions and there have been efforts by certain add-in board companies to further the technology a bit to suit their own demographic. One of the leading companies setting this trend comes to us with a name that’s been around a long time – Diamond Multimedia.

The Radeon 4870 has been available since July and continues to be favored by gamers who want a great-performing graphics card for today’s top-end games – Diamond has ramped it up a bit by slapping on an additional 512MB for a total of 1 Gigabyte and while I’ll be the first to admit that there’s not going to be that big of a performance delta by just additional ram unless you have a game scenario where there are insanely huge textures being loaded – so today’s benchmarks will prove very interesting to see how things turn out.

Specifications:
GPU:     HD4870
ASIC Core:    RV 770
Core Clock :    750MHZ
BUS:        PCI Express x16
Ports:         2 Dual-Link, DVI,Video Out [S-Video, Composite, HDTV]
Stream Processors:        800
MFG Process:    55nm fabrication process
Transistor Count:    956 million
Cooling:    Active – FanCooler
Memory Clock:    900 MHz
Memory Configuration :    32Mx32
Memory Type :    GDDR5
Memory Bandwidth :    160.9 GB/sec
Memory Size :    1024MB
Memory Interface :    256-Bit
RAMDAC :    Dual 400Mhz
HDTV :    YES
HDMI :    HDMI 1.2 / HDMI Ready
HDMI MODE :    Dongle
Native Display Support :    18-, 24-, and 30-bit
3D Resolution :    2560x1600
TV-OUT Resolution :    720

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