Diamond Multimedia, a long-time trusted graphics and audio brand, has announced that the ATI Radeon HD 4870 can be availed from the leading online hardware retail portals. This puts the company at the very forefront of the R770-spec'ed card's launch, together with the cheaper yet efficient ATI Radeon HD 4850.

The final hardware specifications for ATI's bid against NVIDIA's 9800 GTX plays around the dual-slot size, running just within full-card length and full-card height. The 4870 houses a 55-nm chip running at 725 MHz, though its peak FLOPS test maximizes at around 990 GFLOPS and is aided by 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM and is rated at 900 MHz base clock speed.

As with the NVIDIA 9 series, the 4870 (as well as the 4850) is designed for PCIE 2.0, so it's time to upgrade those power supplies and boards for compliance. CrossFire capable - even for newer onboard CrossFire graphics - the 4870 was designed to maximize performance within a 330 buck-budget.

Now while we know you heard it's average price could dip below US$ 300, Diamond's willing to sweeten the offer with a scratch and win promo. The prize? One of 8 custom-painted, high-end rigs.

But how does the new R770 fare against the GTX 200 series? We've collected dozens of test conclusions and many have praised the new ATI line. Others doubt that the 4870 would ever stack up against the GTX 280 even in CrossFire, however.

But since we're also talking about performance here, we say hold off the adoption and await for driver engineering to mature. Till then, stay tuned.

Oh and yes, it can definitely run Crysis.