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Review: Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2,048MB: big frame-buffer useful?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 1 April 2009, 09:48 3.1

Tags: Radeon HD 4870 2GB Vapor-X, Sapphire, PC

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Introduction


Just before the release of you-know-what later on this week, Sapphire's been busy with the current Radeon HD 4800-series line. Built around Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, Sapphire launched a triumvirate of cards - all with custom Vapor-X cooling - with a Radeon HD 4850 and a couple of HD 4870s.

Clocked in at reference speeds, the cards beat out the reference design by having better cooling, but there's more to it than that. The Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X versions ship with either 1GB or 2GB frame-buffer sizes - the latter a Sapphire-only product; no-one else retails the single-GPU card with such capacious memory.

Question is, does a 2GB frame-buffer on the single-GPU Radeon HD 4870 make any sense, or is it more marketing spin than anything else. Let's find out.