Roughly this time last month we were testing a variety of graphics cards in the new Call of Duty: Black Ops video game. I remember picking up a Radeon HD 4870 and thinking to myself “wow I've had this thing forever”, and in a sense I have. Code-named R700, the Radeon HD 4000 series was released two and a half years ago and I'm sure many of you are still using one of these cards in your desktop PC today. The follow up to the R700 architecture was the highly anticipated R800, which paved the way for the Radeon HD 5000 series. The king of that series was the Radeon HD 5870, released on September 2009, the card packed some 2150 million transistors produced using a 40nm manufacturing process. The Radeon HD 5870 was a solid success for AMD, as it remained their flagship single-GPU product for roughly 15 months, and it is only being replaced today. When we first test drove the RadeonHD 5870 we concluded that it was one the best graphics cards we had ever reviewed at that price point, which says it all really.