Radeon HD 4860

The history of the computer industry is replete with examples of how "intermediate" solutions produced by one company or another, having been in the hands of overclockers, significantly increased performance and showed very good results. Many of you probably remember those times when the top models in the ATI line were Radeon 9700 Pro video cards. Then every self-respecting "overclocker" sought to get this video card for personal use, and those who could not afford it bought a Radeon 9500 and tried to convert it into an older model. On modern video cards, turning on additional shader processors or increasing the width of the video card memory bus has become impossible, the times are not the same.

So, according to AMD's idea, the Radeon HD 4860 occupies an intermediate position between the AMD Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 (which, in fact, follows from the model number). To do this, the manufacturer had to slightly reduce the number of stream processors and texture units of the Radeon HD 4860 compared to the HD 4850/4870. On the other hand, the GPU frequency and effective video memory frequency of the Radeon 4860 are noticeably higher than those of the Radeon HD 4850. Apparently, despite the "loss" of part of the pipelines, the increased video memory bandwidth should allow the Radeon HD 4860 to outperform the Radeon HD 4850. Since the heart of the Radeon HD 4860 is a 55nm RV770 GPU, we can count on good overclocking potential.

Specifications ATI Radeon HD 4850

In most cases, the Radeon HD 4860 graphics card is faster than the AMD Radeon HD 4850, although the performance difference between them is small. In any case, even a slight performance advantage over the HD 4850 allowed AMD to place the new product between the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 accelerators.