AMD officially announced its new Radeon graphics card lineup last week, but we are already reading news about factory overclocked versions of the new cards, coming from AMD's partners. Diamond Multimedia is one such partner that has decided to announce an overclocked HD4870 model, which is expected to take on NVIDIA's high-end cards.

The new product is the fruit of a collaboration between Diamond Multimedia, PC builder Smoothcreations and cooling specialist Danger Den. The efforts of these three spawned a card dubbed Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition. And because it comes factory overclocked, gaming users will be able to benefit from the latest in graphics performance straight out of the box. This spells higher GPU and memory clock speeds meant to cope with the latest in desktop PC gaming.

The Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition is equipped with 800 stream processors and boasts an RV770 GPU clocked at 800 MHz, a 50MHz upgrade from the standard 750MHz. The XOC Black Edition comes with 512MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 4400MHz. What is more interesting is that the new DirectX 10.1-supporting card features a firmware that enables it to run at GPU and memory frequencies of 950 and 4800 MHz.

The offer should appeal to those gaming enthusiasts who want to deal with the latest in gaming performance. Because it comes factory overclocked, it can allow users to benefit from the latest in graphics performance. The card will start selling tomorrow at Smoothcreations but for the moment there are no details concerning the price tag of the Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition. The card will probably end-up as an option to Smoothcreations' gaming PC offer.