ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Graphics Card Preview

ATI Radeon HD 4870 Sneak Peak

Only four short months ago AMD launched the Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card and it was the flagship ATI Radeon product. ATI took two RV670 cores (Radeon HD 3870) and put them on the same PCB with the same amount of memory with the bridge chip already on the video card that enabled CrossFire automatically. The result was a graphics card that has two RV670 cores with 1GB of GDDR3 memory at a price point of $449. A Radeon HD 3870 X2 can now be found for just $289 and still packs some serious performance in a single graphics card. Now, the successor to the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 is here with twice the gaming performance of the last generation.

AMD has once again taken two of the latest cores (RV770) and placed them on a single PCB. AMD kept the clock frequencies the same as the Radeon HD 4870 graphics card, so basically you have the power of a pair of those running CrossFire on a single PCB! Our review of the HIS Radeon HD 4870 showed it to be a performance winner at a very nice price point. AMD has once again created a price versus performance winner and they have produced a product that has NVIDIA worried as they don’t have a card that competes at the same price point. The GeForce GTX 280 is the only card that stands a chance to the Radeon HD 4870 X2!

AMD has allowed us to give you a sneak peak of the Radeon HD 4870 graphics card today, but gave us a set of rules to follow when testing the graphics card.

• Previews can include benchmarks of any combination of artificial tests or games up to a maximum of four.
• As PowerPlay has not been enabled in the BIOS on your engineering sample, please stay away from Idle Power tests at this point.
• In the interest of leaving something for the full NDA lift in August, we’d ask you to keep this high level and not go deep on the architecture at this point.

Since this is just a preview, we will get straight to the good stuff and leave the high level stuff for later as we haven’t had too much time to spend with the card and haven’t been fully briefed on the architecture of the new bridge chip that AMD is using to join the two cores together.