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Power Consumption

To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we ran a demanding part of 3DMark06.

These numbers are a bit surprising: while the HD4850 seems quite efficient, it seems like the HD 4870 is relatively less so. That idle is particularly high for a GPU that is about half the size of the GTX 280's GPU. This card seems to like the juice! Not to an alarmingly extent; but a bit more than expected. Still less than the GTX 280 and 9800 GX2 monster cards however.

Conclusion

Usually, when each team releases a new generation of graphics cards, fans from either side can argue that one or the other is the better bet to go with. This time around though, this might be a much harder proposition. 

While the GTX 280 is an engineering marvel, and offers substantial performance, in almost every respect the HD 4870 comes out ahead. Just judging from a value perspective alone, there is no contest: the HD 4870 by offers more for your money than does the GTX 280.

Perhaps the earlier switch to 55nm paid off -- this time around, ATI just delivered a thunderous one-two punch combination with the HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards. 

I fully expect that NVIDIA will adjust and react accordingly, and will offer high-end cards (very soon) at more competitive prices, but at these early stages of  the game, it will be very difficult to top the performance offered by the HD 4870, for around the $300 mark. The HD 4870 is cheaper to produce, and seemingly more efficient than the GTX 280 currently, and really, after looking at these benchmarks results, there seems to be very few reasons to recommend a GTX 280 over a HD 4870. ATI just bust down the door and stole the show this time around -- and it has been a long time indeed since you could say that.

Beside the actual 4800 series cards themselves, perhaps the best thing about this new generation's launch is that the level of competition between the red team and the green team just shot way up -- probably almost off the charts. Who knows... perhaps NVIDIA even decided to 'throw' this round because they have something explosive coming up in the pipes -- you never can tell. But for now, there really isn't much beating the value and gaming goodness offered by the HD 4870. The HD 4850 represents a better deal at $199, when it comes to down to the bang-for-buck, but if you are looking for something a little bit more, at the next step up  the HD 4870 stands pretty much alone. Sure, the GTX 280 can beat it sometimes -- but not as much as you'd expect for something that costs more than twice as much.

With the complete bundle, a fair price, and a helpful tech-support line offered by Diamond, if you are looking for a super-charged upgrade to your gaming rig, it would be hard to do much better this summer than picking up a Diamond Radeon HD 4870.