Okay, we're done with the Radeon HD 4850 cards. Now lets move on to the bigger and badder brother of the HD 4850, the HD 4870. This card has been labeled as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX crusher in terms of price-performance ratio.

First, we have the Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Force3D is the ATI arm of Innovision, who markets NVIDIA products under the Inno3D brand name. The Force3D card is based completely on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 reference design. A sticker was pasted over the original heatsink to indicate it is a product by Force3D. Clocks of this card are 750MHz and 900MHz respectively for core and memory.

The Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which is based off the ATI reference design.

The rear of the Radeon HD 4870 512MB.

The Radeon HD 4870 employs a dual-slot cooling solution, allowing all the hot air from the graphics card to be exhausted directly out of the case. This prevents heat build up within a system and maintains system temperature during long periods of graphics-intensive usage. The downside is the loss of being able to use the neighbouring card slot as the cooler will take up the space of one card.

Dual-slot cooling solution ensures hot air is exhausted out of the case and not recycled.

The Radeon HD 4870 requires more juice, and we get two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors on this card, similar to what we find on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra, 9800 GTX/GTX+ and GTX 260.

Dual 6-pin PCI Express power connectors on the Radeon HD 4870 512MB.

Like the Radeon HD 4850, the Radeon HD 4870 is also ATI CrossFire-ready.