Sapphire presents HD4860 Platinum

AMD will launch its HD5800 series of graphics cards next week, which means the current generation of GPUs will have their production limited. This is the ideal moment for consumers to acquire a new graphics card: these periods of transition cause special models to feature attractive pricetags. In the past, we've seen such deals with nVidia's 6800LE and 7900GTO cards, as well as ATI's Radeon X800GTO and X1950GT.

This time its Sapphire that introduces a new model, the Radeon HD4860 Platinum. This card is based on an RV790 core with 640 enabled shader units and a lower clock frequency of 700 MHZ. The card uses QiMonda GDDR5 memory that is clocked at 750 MHz (effectively 3000 MHz). In terms of memory bandwidth, this places the card in between the HD4850 with GDDR3 and the HD4870 with GDDR5. The decrease in active shaderunits however make the card run slightly slower. Where the HD4850 reached exactly 1 TFlop of computing power, this HD4860 with 700 MHz core clock stalls at 896 GFlops, about 10% slower.

Sapphire has equipped the new Radeon HD4860 with a 5+2 phase power design and an alternative dualslot cooling with copper heatpipes. Like with the HD4890, Sapphire has added two PEG6 power-connectors. The card has DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs available. Sapphire's HD4870 Platinum is to cost about $120.

Sapphire's new HD4860 sports DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI outputs

The aluminum heatsink with copper heatpipes allow for quite some overclocking potential

Sapphire HD4860 with RV790 core and GDDR5 memory

Tags: ddr3 gddr5 displayport hd4870 hd4850 hd4890 hdmi heatpipe overclocking radeon

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