ATI's probably pretty mad Nvidia stole some of the excellent mid-range Radeon HD 4850's thunder by dropping the GeForce 9800 GTX+ for a mere $30 more. So they're hitting back with a special Radeon HD 4800 card designed solely for the crushing of Nvidia's top-of-the-line GTX 280 graphics card in pure performance.

Code-named "Super RV770," it has pre-installed water-cooling and an unlocked BIOS so you can push the core speed to 950MHz (maybe beyond 1GHz) with a memory bandwidth of 150GBps, even more than the GTX 280.

Diamond's Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition (which launched today for Smooth Creations' build-to-order gaming PCs) is actually the first "Super RV770" card, though it's not clocked quite as high as AMD's super spec. TG Daily expects announcements from other ATI partners like Asus and Sapphire to be coming up shortly. Of course, this is all talk 'til we see some benches. [TG Daily]

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