Months after the release of RV770 chip and Radeon HD 4870 cards, AMD has let its partners to mess around with their own designs.
This naturally means more competition and more diversity, as design by ATI cards are almost identical. Usually ATI doesn’t let anyone to interfere with mainstream and performance products at first, due to their complexity and they don’t want their partners to destroy the image of the product, due to their incompetence. At this time partners can make their own Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 cards.
There will be some cards with Display port and HDMI and naturally DVI will still be a part of these cards. We are sure that you will see quite a few and so far we are aware that Gigabyte and likely Sapphire are making its own design 4870 card.
In the US, built by ATI cards are selling under $200 for 512MB card, depending on the card and 1GB cards are really catching momentum as they can make difference in a few new games.
