Posted 07/22/09 at 10:31:00 PM by Michael Brown

The 55nm RV770 is one of the best arrows in AMD’s GPU quiver, so it’s a good thing the part has proven to be both versatile and powerful. As deployed in the Radeon HD 4870, the RV770 has a full complement of 800 stream processors—just like the Radeon HD 4850—but in this design, the GPU is paired with GDDR5 memory.

GDDR5 memory boasts a very high data rate (ranging from 3.6Gb/s to 6.0Gb/s, compared to GDDR3’s 1.0Gb/s to 2GB/s). This enables AMD to deliver nearly the same memory bandwidth through a relatively narrow and inexpensive 256-bit bus as it would with a much wider and costlier 512-bit bus.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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