ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Graphics Card Preview

A Closer Look

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 has a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCI Express power connector that are both required for proper video card operation.

The AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 supports CrossFireX via the single CrossFire interconnect (bridge connector) that is located on top of 10.5″ long video card.

With the back plate removed from the AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 we can get a good look at the Hynix GDDR5 memory IC’s that are being used. These memory ICs are rated at at 4.0 Gbps and are model number H5GQ1H24MJR-T0C. The Radeon HD 4870 that we reviewed last month uses Qimonda GDDR5 memory ICs, so these are different.

With the heat sink and cooling fan removed we can see that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 uses two copper heat sinks to cool the two cores. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 used one copper and one aluminum, so this is a better cooling solution. The PLX chip that AMD used on this board is the PEX86BB-AA50BC F, which is a big improvement over the switch used on the Radeon HD 3870 X2 as this one is PCI Express 2.0 compliant.