14 DAY TRIAL // We all know that NVIDIA has been wearing the crown for the highest performance graphics card, for a couple of years now. The release of its GT200-series has been highly talked about and most believe that the manufacturer's reign is still far from over. But with the release of its RV770-based cards, ATI is breathing hard down NVIDIA's neck, for the very first time in a long time.
As most of you already know, the ATI Radeon 4870 is equipped with two six-pin power connectors, which support a maximum TDP of 225 watts. But that power isn't required by the card, if clocked at stock levels, which leaves roughly about 55 watts of room for overclocking and really figuring out what these cards are capable of. AMD decided to clock its cards at current levels in order to allow them to perform flawlessly with a level of performance that sometimes even rivals NVIDIA's GTX 260.
Apparently, AMD has seen a real chance with its new cards and has decided to develop a new AIB/OEM-only product codenamed "Super RV770", which is expected to be much more powerful than the company's current graphics cards. This means that AMD is thinking of going after the high-performance crown worn by NVIDIA for these past few years.
The "Super RV770" card will arrive with a pre-installed water-cooling solution and will feature unlocked BIOS, which enables the GPU to be pushed all the way to 950MHz. But some even believe that the new GPU will be able to reach clock speeds beyond 1GHz, that is if the card uses TEC elements to keep the temperatures down. The new Radeon will also be capable of achieving a bandwidth of 150 GB/s as the card is going to support a memory pushed at 4.8GT/s (1.2GHz QDR).
One example of AMD's RV770 GPU capability has been recently announced by Diamond Multimedia with its Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition. This card's GPU has been clocked at 800 MHz, with a memory speed of 4400MHz. But it still is far from achieving the performance level of AMD's Super RV770.