The RV770 is perhaps the best thing that happened to AMD in a long while. But more than AMD, it's perhaps the best thing that happened to us, the consumers. But general product launches seem to be just the tip of the ice-berg. The new PCB's designed by ATI for RV770 cards are actually running at well below the clock speed they can support and there is every reason to believe that these cards will be challenging NVIDIA's very best.

The HD4870 PCB with two 6-pin power connectors can support a maximum TDP of 225W (2x 75W from the power connectors + 75W from the PCI-Express interface). While at stock parameters, the HD4870 will not consume over 170W, it implies that with a fair bit of binning for high-performing parts, there is a serious lot of room for overclocking way beyond what the ordinary HD4870 cards can take.

ATI is binning the parts to a lowest denominator required for good yields and a level of performance that reaches or sometimes overtakes the GeForce GTX 260. But this time around, the company developed an AIB/OEM-only product codenamed "Super RV770", which will be much more powerful.

These cards will come with pre-installed water-cooling and feature an 'unlocked BIOS'. Déjà Vu? Yes, it's perhaps the same parts that went into making the Diamond HD4870 XOC Unlocked Black Edition which was released earlier. The BIOS allows manufacturers to push the GPU core speed all the way up to 950 MHz, with the memory being able to scale up to 1200 MHz (effective: 4.80 GHz). With even better cooling such as a thermo-electric couple (TEC) cooler, you might be able to push it a little further. At 1200 MHz memory, the card attains a memory bandwidth of 150 GBps.

With Diamond Multimedia already having a product in the making, expect announcements from other ATI partners such as ASUS, Sapphire, HIS and GeCube.