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Radeon 4870: Does It Matter Who Made Yours?

Once you’ve found the GPU that best fits your needs, does it really matter which vendor sells you the card? We recently compared the prices, features, and performance of two third-party Radeon HD 4870 designs—Palit’s HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition and Sapphire’s HD 4870 Toxic Edition—against AMD’s reference design to determine which vendor offered the best value--or if there was any difference at all.
AMD is now following Nvidia's lead by transitioning away from offering its own video cards at retail, so that it will no longer compete head-to-head with its add-in-board (AIB) partners. However, both companies will design a reference board for each new GPU and give that design to their partners as a model from which to build (they might even build the entire card and sell it to the AIBs, whose only contribution then would essentially become adding the logo to the cooling shroud). Reference designs are invariably conservative with relatively low clock speeds and less-than-premium coolers. However, these reference designs are often the only implementations available to consumers during the first few months after the introduction of a new GPU.



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Radeon 4870: Does It Matter Who Made Yours? : Introduction

I buy video cards in my price range and I don't care who made it.

Hi Mansrm,

The interesting thing with this article was that the cheapest card can at times be the best

Thanks for sharing this amazing article.
For me I wont buy even if the same GPU, Cause some of the company's bulits better cooling fans or heat-sink. and some comes with a bit faster GPU Mhz.
So for me before buying anything I must know whats the diff between each of them.
From what I see in shopps that most of people buys the Sapphire’s HD 4870.
Cause its cheapest between other brands.
So still, depends on what graphic card your going for there must be other brands selling the same graphic card. but with few changes you can say, so keep reading and ooking for the difference between each brand.

Interesting read.

well the one thing I consider.. is who has the BEST warranty. and that is Visiontek.. if I remember right.

after visiontek's Lifetime warranty., it's ASUS with a 3 year..

that would be important to ME!

True, forgot to mention that ^^