ATI’S Flagship landed well over a month ago. Before then, gamers had nothing but hype and rumors of 2GB of GDDR5, Dual GPUs and Shader 4.1 to keep them warm. With the arrival of the 4870×2, those rumors are now reality and the hype has proven to be fact.

The introduction of the original 4870 brought ATI back into the mainstream. Its price to performance ratio was far better than that of the nVidia GTX280, but with recent nVidia price drops, that gap is narrowing. Many of us rushed out to scoop up the 4870, because of the price/performance sweet spot it had attained and were rewarded with the ability to play our favorite games at higher resolutions.

People across the globe purchasing and building systems based on the higher-end Intel chipset to utilize dual GPU setups now have a reason to justify their purchases. For quite some time, people that were dreaming of a better-than-average gaming rig were forced to go with SLI simply because of the pure graphics power the nVidia 8xxx and 9xxx graphic cards offered over ATI cards. Things have changed.

• http://www.pro-clockers.com/reviews/?id=100