Looking at the current pricing on Pricegrabber, for a HD4870 1GB you will need to invest just over $200 and for the non-X2 HD4850 you can spend under $150 with a little effort.  These prices may come down in the very near future, but as it stands that is what it will cost you.  The GTX260 can be had for a hair under $200, rounding out the current upper midrange card selection.  There is a possible fourth choice, which is to pick up a pair of HD4670 cards for about $160 and run them in Crossfire.  How viable a choice is this?  Drop by X-bit Labs to see how they fare against each other.

“Considering the recent reduction of prices on AMD/ATI’s produces, we are interested to learn how appealing an even cheaper CrossFireX subsystem, based of two Radeon HD 4670 cards, may be. This simple affordable RV730-based graphics card is a perfect choice for HTPCs but is no good for gamers due to its low performance in modern games – it has only 8 raster back-ends and a 128-bit memory bus. The new recommended price of the Radeon HD 4870 is only $149 (for the version with 512 megabytes of memory) and buying two Radeon HD 4670 cards at once won’t be much of a saving. But is there an option of cheap upgrade if you’ve already got one such card? Let’s see how effective this anti-crisis solution is from a technical point of view.”

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