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Last week saw the introduction of the HD 4800 series from AMD/ATI, and the reverberations from that release are still resounding across the web. Reviewing the HD 4850 surprised everybody out there, including us  -- everyone had heard it was going to be fast, and offer great value, but the extent of both these claims weren't really properly quantified until we ran through the benchmarks, and saw that it kept up (and passed) even the fastest of video cards in our current testing-lab arsenal.

Today we are going to follow up that review with a look at the HD 4850's big brother: the HD 4870. The Diamond Radeon HD 4870 is certainly going to be fast -- but just how fast, we are eager to find out. Retailing for $299, this reference board design Radeon should be propelled to great speeds, thanks in large part to 512MB's of zipping fast GDDR5 memory. Judging from the HD 4850's great performance, we are guessing the only cards that should be able to keep up are the much more expensive 9800GX2, and the also recently released king-daddy next-gen card from NVIDIA, the monstrous GTX 280.

The HD 4850's release was definitely an important milestone in the history of ATI. Foregoing the strategy of starting a new generation off with a big, bad and loud expensive bang, the HD 4850 was aimed right at the jugular of the market place: most gamers would consider buying a $199 card, but not as many would want to buy something over $400. And for $199, the HD 4850 delivered -- as much as the HD 4870 will today? We'll find out. 

But besides gaming prowess, the HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards also feature a rich slew of features, including support for DirectX10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, the UVD2 high-definition video playback engine, improved power usage, and readiness to be connected with up to three other 3xxx series (or better) ATI cards in a CrossFireX setup.

How fast is fast? Let's find out today in our look at the Diamond HD 4870.