Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2GB

The Radeon HD 4870 is not the newest available card from ATI; the HD 4890 replaced it earlier this year. Performance on the HD 4870 is still excellent for the price. Sapphire went the extra mile with the cooling on the card, rarely going higher than 68C even under the most stressful situations. 2GB of memory really shows off when setting anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, as the extra memory gets used in those situations. Sapphire offers an attractive package with the addition of 3DMark Vantage to show off your new card's potential. The performance is on the same scale as other HD 4870 cards in most situations due to the clock speed being the same. One big thing that this card has going for it, however is the ability to overclock with maximum overclocks of 790MHz for the core and 1100MHz for the memory which is the highest clock speed allowed by ATI's Overdrive utility. The card is currently available for $269 on Newegg, meaning that there is a $100 surcharge for the extra gig of memory. Overall this card is a very interesting specimen that qualifies for an Editor's Choice due to its cooling and 2GB of memory.

Link: Motherboards

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2GB Review