SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card 100259-1GL

Pros: Runs everything I'm throwing at it with no issues.

World of Warcraft runs at 60 fps with all settings at high besides shadows, which I turn down a couple notches. In a loaded Wintergrasp or in wide open areas (flying over Ice Crown zone), frames can go as low as 30fps... Dalaran is crazy as we all know, so I only get 15-20 fps there. All raid zones, even Ulduar and Naxx are at or around 45-50fps in 25-man.

Call of Duty 4 runs everything maxed out with no frame rate issues in single or multi-player online. Both WoW and COD4 look great too.

I've been watching the GPU's heat very closely as I've read that can be a concern with this card. The fan auto-adjusts speed depending on load, and I never go above an average at load temp of 51-53C. Once, after playing COD for 5 hours, it was at 60C. So I'm happy to report no real issues there.

Cons: I originally installed Catalyst with the drivers, but I was getting much lower fps in WoW initially. After reading the tech support forums for WoW, it sounds like WoW - among many other applications - doesn't like the Catalyst program. I went from 40fps max in WoW to 60fps in many areas just by uninstalling Catalyst and then re-installing the drivers without Catalyst.

Also, hopefully ATI will improve their drivers as it does suffer some frame rate performance issues in those wide open areas I was talking about earlier (i.e., flying over Ice Crown).

I've been told by people online with nvidia cards of the same gen as mine that they don't notice a big slow down like I do (from 60fps to 30fps) in that zone. I'm guessing this is driver related as this card has plenty of power to handle these challenges you would think...

Overall Review: System Info:
Gigabyte MA790GP-UD4H
Corsair VX550W 550 Watt Power Supply
AMD Athlon X2 7850
OCZ 2x 2GB DDR2 800
Seagate Barracuda 250GB
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 1gb DDR5
Sony CD/DVD RW Drive
Windows XP 32 bit (waiting for Windows 7)
Coolermaster Centurian 5 ATX Case

Pros: Card runs all games at max settings. Noticeable difference from previous card which was a GeForce 8800 GT.

Cons: 1st card died after 7 months of average use. Turned it on one day to 3 red diag lights. Went though Sapphire RMA process which was really easy, had a RMA number in about 4 hours. 2 weeks later, Sapphire had sent a brand new card to replace the one that died.

Overall Review: Hope new cards lasts longer than 7 months.