Korean cooling specialist Zalman introduced the ZM-RHS90 heatsink specially designed for ATI Radeon HD 4890, and HD 4870 reference-design PCB. The heatsink is made of anodized aluminum. It measures 93.4 x 36.5 x 23 mm (LxWxH), and weighs 55 g. Due to the large number of Radeon HD 4890/HD 4870 graphics cards in the market using the reference AMD PCB design, Zalman expects a good compatibility range. The heatsink is mounted behind the VDDC chokes, and covers the most significant set of MOSFETs on the card. It uses push-pin retention mechanism. The use of this heatsink is recommended by Zalman, when users opt for their compatible GPU heatsinks that don't cover the card's VRM area. It will arrive at stores very soon.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, is thrilled to offer the most exciting game bundle to all gamers: the latest DirectX 10.1 support game-S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky with PowerColor HD4870 series graphics!

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is set in 2011 and brings forth the events to have preceded the third campaign of Strelok to the Zone center. It has enabled DirectX 10.1 in game, numerous features and optimizations improvements, and has offered up 7% or more performance when compared to DirectX 10 games. PowerColor gamers can take full advantage of the featuring assets of DirectX 10.1 with HD4870 series graphics, promoting superior visual experience.

Global graphics card leader, MSI International, has unveiled the R4870-MD1G and R4870-MD512 graphics cards. MSI designed these two cards to be perfect for gamers demanding performance, quality, and low-temperature operation by equipping them with an extra large fan, an extra cool cooling system, and extra long lifespan components. The entire card features best class solid capacitors and SSC (solid-state chokes) built-in to the design that helps to smoothly handle high-power levels and punch-out amazing performance. The solid design also helps to extend the cards total lifespan. Featuring all three - HDMI, DVI and D-Sub (VGA) - major display output, these two cards are sure to please those looking for big-screen LCD monitor or LCD TV display.

Empowering consumers to get elite-level computing performance for under $900 U.S. dollars, AMD today launched "Dragon" platform technology for desktop PCs featuring the new AMD Phenom II X4 processor. Even the most demanding users such as enthusiasts and high-end gamers desire affordable systems capable of delivering HD entertainment, graphic-intensive game play at the highest settings their monitors can handle, as well as quick and easy transfer of video entertainment to and from mobile devices. Dragon platform technology provides the power to do it all by combining AMD's highest-performing CPU, the AMD Phenom II X4 processor, with award winning ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series graphics and AMD 7-Series chipsets. And it's offered at an incredible value with Dragon-based systems available for up to $1,200 U.S. dollars less than competing systems that deliver comparable performance.

Leading global PC manufacturers HP, Dell and Alienware plan to offer Dragon platform technology-based desktop systems in the first quarter of 2009, with Dell offering immediate availability in its Dell XPS desktop line. "The XPS 625 desktop powered by AMD's Dragon platform technology features new AMD Phenom II processors to enable a significant boost in speed for enhanced gaming, as well as the flexibility to enable multi-tasking and HD video capabilities free from delays, stalls and lags," said Arthur Lewis, general manager of Dell Gaming Group. "The XPS 625 gives gamers the unbelievable experience they expect at a price point that won't break the bank."

TechConnect have got hold of what appears to be official imagery of a new 1GB variant of the Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic. It shows the card will feature a dual-slot, 3 heatpipe, Vapor-X Cooler, presumably using the same Vapor Chamber Technology (VCT), though one would hope that the heatpipes will not be in the way of the Crossfire fingers when the card hits retail. It can be seen on the product packaging that the card is factory overclocked and if the 512MB 4870 Toxic is anything to go by, the GPU will be clocked around 780Mhz with the memory around 4Ghz. There is yet no word on availabilty or pricing, but TechConnect expects it to arrive in the next few weeks.

Gigabyte today, has released a new graphics card based on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics processor (GPU), in a non-reference design. While sporting a thin and light appearance, the card retains high-grade electrical components such as digital PWM circuitry the reference PCB sports. The prominent features of the card include a DisplayPort connector alongside an HDMI port, both on the PCB. The card features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory made by Qimonda, across a 256-bit wide bus.

Being non-reference and Gigabyte, it's expected to have a blue coloured PCB. The GPU is cooled by a Zalman VF830 cooler, which features on several of today's graphics cards by Gigabyte. The memory is left to be cooled under its air-flow. The VRM area gets a heatsink of its own. The card is powered by two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors. It uses reference clock speeds of 750 MHz for the GPU and 900 MHz (effective 3600 MT/s) for the memory. It is yet to be priced.

French site Matbe, posted today photos of the first ATI video card produced by ASUS and branded as Dark Knight edition. This is the third card (correct me if I'm wrong) to go under this relatively new series of ASUS video cards. The EAH4870 DK/HTDI/512M is an ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 512MB GDDR5 memory, a PCI-Express 2.0 interface CrossFireX support and dual-DVI connectivity. Although the Dark Knight nickname suggests boosted clock speeds the card comes at the reference 750MHz GPU and 3600MHz memory speeds. It only features an improved cooling system, that consists of four heatpipes and bigger fan. Early European etailers already price the card at 263 Euro. A Dark Knight HD 4870 with 1GB onboard memory is also rumored to be in the works.

AMD/ATI's graphics partner Sapphire has released today Radeon HD 4870 TOXIC, an overclocked Radeon HD 4870 card with a custom cooling on it. What makes this card so special is the patented Vapor-X cooling system and its clock speeds higher than the reference boards. The cooling itself takes up two slots, makes use of a Vapour Chamber technology and features a thermally-controlled fan supported by three copper heatpipes. The new TOXIC model is also factory-overclocked to 780MHz GPU from 750MHz stock speed and 4000MHz memory from 3600MHz stock respectively. The card is equipped with 512MB GDDR5 memory. It offers 800 Stream Processors, has DirectX 10.1 and CrossFireX support, a PCI-Express 2.0 interface and two DVI connectors. Except that and maybe the fancy retail box it ships with, there's nothing else about this card that could interest you more. Pricing and availability are still unknown.

CoolIT Systems had several cooling products on site designed to reduce the noise and temperatures of the latest graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA.Just announced last week, Cooling System for the HD 4870 X2 using a 120 mm fan.

Sapphire has been showing off their new HD 4850 non-reference design, that you have already been discussing here. The card uses an eight layer PCB designed by Sapphire and comes with a quieter cooler. Even though it offers these improvements, the card is cheaper to make which should bring its retail price below that of the reference design cards.

XpertVision is Palit's European VGA graphics cards brand. Only recently they released an announcement that the brands will merge again to become "Palit Microsystems Ltd.".

At the show we saw several new ATI based cards from Palit. Since their booth is located in the AMD hall, no NVIDIA cards were on display.First up is the new Palit HD 4870 which does not use the AMD reference design. The cooler is equipped with two fans and is much quieter than the normal cards. The HD 4870 Sonic Dual features DisplayPort and a Turbo switch which allows you to change the clock frequencies on the fly. When in "Turbo" mode, the card runs at 775/1000 and 750/950 in "Normal" mode. Even in normal mode this is still an overclock over the AMD reference clocks.

Force3D are excited to introduce the Force3D Radeon HD4870 with the high performance Freezer DHT cooler that is equipped with DHT (Direct Heatpipe Touch) technology. The heatpipes touch the GPU directly and transfers the heat hence cooling performance is maximized. The fan is silent and its durability is excellent by hydromantic bearing method.

When pictures of the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 PCS (Professional Cooling System) first hit the internet, it caught the attention of many for having a very upscale hardware feature set. It comes with a 6-phase power circuit, it is based on the SuperRV770 design methodology, comes with a cooler made by ZeroTherm that looks promising. As expected the card comes with overclocked GPU and memory parameters.

Expreview decided to give one of these cards a go before they hit the markets. They spent a day extensively testing it and found a glitch with the BIOS with which the card's stability at those parameters is marred. The BIOS has a very low fan-speed limit (the maximum speed to which the fan can be adjusted by the user). This results in a very hot GPU and instability during prolonged operation. To give you an idea, the card was able to clear the 3DMark Vantage benchmark but simply gave up on them when running the FurMark benchmark, it failed to clear the tests. Nonetheless, this product gained a very positive opinion, hopefully with this glitch cleared by PowerColor, the card could prove to be promising.

Another HD 4870 X2 picture leak comes from an anonymous E-Mail in my inbox. The pictures show how the PowerColor HD 4870 X2 will look like.

The first product images of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 have been posted at Pro-Clockers. This card is based on the reference ATi design and features a total of 2 GB GDDR5 memory. GPU Café reports online stores to have started listing this product (such as this one) within a 5% price-range of the GeForce GTX 280, pre-release reviews already point to high performance gains over the GeForce GTX 280. The product formally launches this Tuesday.

PowerColor is preparing an overclocked Radeon HD4870, the PCS (Professional Cooling System) model. This model uses 1 GB of GDDR5 memory and uses overclocked parameters, such as 800 MHz core. This card comes with a cooler made by Zerotherm comprising of heatpipes conducting to aluminum fins on either sides of a fan. According to TG Daily, this card could be based on the SuperRV770 concept, where high-performing parts are used along with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. According to PowerColor, this cooler could keep the temperatures down by up to 20° C versus reference ATI cooler even at the overclocked 800 MHz core setting.

As we reported earlier here Diamond Multimedia is preparing a special unlocked Black Edition Radeon HD 4870 card. We just received a first picture:

Although unreliable sources have been pointing out to the possibility that The Radeon HD 4870 X2 (R700) could come in a 2GB variant for a while now, we now get reports from even the Taiwanese industry observer, DigiTimes that the R700 in fact could come in a 2048 MB GDDR5 flavour. Similar reports have also been sourced from the likes of HKEPC and ChipHell. Current products such as the Radeon HD 4870 come equipped with "IDGV51-05A1F1C-40X" 512 Mbit GDDR5 chips made by Qimonda, the cards feature 8 such chips. It's already known that the R700 comes with a total of 16 memory chips, 8 on each side of the PCB, Qimonda readies its 1 Gbit memory chips slated for a July, 2008 release, Hyundai/Hynix already have their parts in the making.

Expect this product to launch by late August.With inputs from DigiTimes

Diamond Multimedia (www.diamondmm.com), a leading manufacturer of PC graphics cards, sound cards and communications products, launched today along with boutique system builder Smoothcreations, and Water cooling mavens, Danger Den the ATI Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition graphics card. This card offers exquisite gaming capabilities combined with state of the art efficiency.

The HD 4870 is a smoking gun dual slot card, PCIE 2.0, with 512MB of DDR5 memory and a clock speed of 800 MHz. The memory speed is 1100 MHz and is designed with 800 stream processors. The HD 4870 provides plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX upgradeability with up to quad-GPU support. Continuing with ATI's Power Play and 55nm processing technology, this card is the fastest and efficient. "The Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition was clocked to kick some ass". We didn't just want a fast card out in the market, we wanted the fastest card that could kick the living daylights and bust some performance records, say Mario Gastelum, Director of Product Development & Engineering. "we wanted a card that kicked the competitions teeth into the curb", and that's exactly what our engineers accomplished". "The firmware was custom designed to enable end users to go beyond the normal over clocked speeds and allow them to push their cards for higher performance via the catalyst control center." The GPU's custom firmware has been unlocked to push cards to GPU settings of up to 950 MHz and Memory of up 1200 MHz.

Update: Diamond has decided to make "these cards available in ecommerce in the next few days".

Asetek's industry-leading, LCLC liquid cooling solution is now available for AMD's latest ATI Radeon HD 4870 family of graphics cards. The unique, single-slot liquid cooling approach provides OEMs with an extremely high overclocking capability enabling them to design and produce outstanding gaming and entertainment products with virtually no noise.

To meet the demands of advanced gaming or graphics-intensive applications, Asetek's highly integrated solution lowers the GPU temperatures found on the 4870 by as much as 26 degrees, enabling it to run significantly cooler in extreme performance modes of operation. And, since the Asetek solution is totally liquid cooled, the graphics card can run completely silent, except for the system heat exchanger fan that typically runs at a quiet 30 dB(A).

Well-known graphics card maker GECUBE, released today with great fanfare, the new HD 4870 series of high-end graphics cards, the successor to its popular HD 4850 series. The GECUBE HD 4870 series comes with exclusive GDDR5 memory and the latest AMD graphics technology. Built on the 2nd generation 55nm chip process, it incorporates the PCI-Express 2.0 interface, as well as support for DirectX10.1/SM4.1 and ATI CrossFireX. Also included, are built-in HDMI and HDCP together with support for Blu-ray and HD-DVD decoding technology. Extreme processing power, coupled with high-speed memory performance, delivers world-class video visuals that will introduce gamers to the most realistic audio and video experience to date.

Force3D has, today, announced the specifications of its first SKU powered by AMD's HD 4870 GPU. A core speed of 750 MHz, paired together with 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at a frequency of 3.6 GB/s are the order of the day, whilst technicalities such as the presence of 800 stream processors and a 256-bit memory interface prove commonality with AMD's HD 4850 offering. Using Extreme settings, Force3D's own 3DMark Vantage results claim that their HD 4870 iteration has a speed advantage of 58% over the HD 3870X2.

I'm sure all of you guys know all the goodies that will be coming with the launch of the next series of high-end cards from AMD. In case you need a recap of the awesomeness headed our way, please check out the source link. Anyways, enough propoganda. For those of you who are interested in buying the latest high-end offerings from AMD, the current rumor says that we should see new cards in August 2008 for a price far below the current rumored prices of the high-end NVIDIA cards. NVIDIA cards have traditionally been more expensive, and the GTX280 is supposedly going to cost nerds somewhere in the ballpark of $500USD. There is no confirmed pricepoint for the new cards from AMD. However, we can be fairly confident that it will be quite a bit less than $500USD. Another interesting rumor to note is that there will be a much larger difference between the HD4870 and the HD4850, as opposed to the comparatively small difference between the HD3870 and the HD3850.