Micro Star Incorporated, MSI is one of those companies that have been making video cards, motherboards and other computer equipment for years. A Tier-1 motherboard maker based in Taiwan, MSI has recently fell a bit out of favor with the enthusiast community for several years due to lack of visibility in the motherboard space.
ATI has completed a monumental comeback against their arch-rival NVIDIA due to price/performance leadership and NVIDIA's problems with their motherboards and graphics chips on their mobile graphics platform. ATI has released the HD 4870 512MB, 4870 X2, 4850, 4670, 4550, 4350, the 4870 1GB and the HD 4830 in the span of three months now has a top to bottom line up from $529 to $35 that NVIDIA has had to retool their own lineup to match.
Today's card on the review bench is the MSI Radeon HD 4870 1GB card based upon ATI's top single GPU solution with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. This card is retailing online at Newegg for $299 and is the direct competitor to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260+ card retailing for a similar price point. So what's the card all about? Does 1GB really make a difference in a gaming environment? Will updated drivers and a modest speed increase show a performance difference between the 1GB and 512MB models? Let's find out.
