Quote Originally Posted by whocaresbg View Post
Because the GDDR5 memory is in final testing stage . I think that AMD will release only "Performance" RV770's part in May, equipped with GDDR3 memory and Flagship parts RV770XT&R700 with GDDR5 will come later at Computex time probably .
Hmm, that's possible, but you're forgetting the rv770xt IS "performance", most likely the 4850 will come out first as that's supposed to have either gddr4 or gddr3 (don't remember off the top of my head). But I highly doubt the 4870 will come out with gddr3 unless if 3rd party manufacturers decide to do that as an option same way there are 3870 gddr3 and 3850 gddr4 counter parts.

Quote Originally Posted by Origin_Unknown View Post
that cooler looks quite short!

also its interesting from the nordichardware link that ATi are planning on releasing a GDDR3 version before the GDDR5
Hopefully that means the 4870 will be quite short also. That's a smart move on ati's part to do so, but I'm pretty certain that's going to be the rv740 coming out with gddr3. But either way, I looking for to seeing the 4670's performance. Think about it, 240 shaders, 20 TMUs, and 256 bit memory with the possibility of gddr4. This thing will probably be at the performance of the 3850 or above, especially with af and aa enabled because it's a lot less bottlenecked than the r600 ever was. Plus it should be cheap as hell, so I'm considering to make it my next upgrade if the 4870 is out of the question (gt200 for sure, wayyy too expensive, even if the performance is there, yields will be terrible).


Quote Originally Posted by Papu View Post
and the 2900 cooler looked like the x1900 cooler and 3870 , they all look very similar.
No that's not quite true. The x1900 coolers do not look like the 2900xt cooler, nor the majority of the x1950 coolers, the x1950xtx cooler however is a simpler version of the 2900xt's cooler. I just wish the 2900xtx's cooler would have been put on the 2900xt, that thing was a monster, something like 4 heatpipes and a blower attached, but it was long as hell because of it. And the 3870's cooler is also considerably different, larger better designed fan, no heatpipes, and quite a bit smaller.

However this rv770 cooler and the 2900xt cooler look very similar, but the 4870 has 2 heatpipes while 2900xt has 3, and as someone else pointed out the bases are slightly different. Most likely that's due to the r600 die being considerably larger and thus needing to be placed diagonally to conserve space.


But hey I'm not complaining, if this means low temps and silence, I'm all for it. The 3870 cooler was quiet, but wasn't great at heat removal because it was just a copper block. The 3850 cooler was kinda meh but looked kinda cool. The 8800gt's cooler just kinda...sucked...period. However the g92 gts cooler was both quiet and efficient at removing heat and that's why the g92 gts(s) are selling like hotcakes even though the 8800gt is like $10-$30 cheaper and offers almost the same performance. In other words, I think ati was taking notes on how well the g92 gts was selling compared to the 8800gt and 3870 (relative to how many cards the respective companies produced) and thus decided to do the same.

To be honest the 2 heatpipes probably aren't completely necessary, but once again, I'm not complaining, I just wonder what the new Ice Q 4 turbo cooler for the 4870 will be considering the 4870's stock cooler is better than the Ice q 3 turbo (with the exception of the UV housing)