Diamond Radeon HD 4870 X2 review

[Julio Franco]

ATI has made a notable comeback over the past year with enticing GPU releases that have been able to match and sometimes surpass Nvidia's offerings in terms of performance, power consumption and value.

As things stand today, the GeForce GTX 280 is the fastest single GPU graphics card available, while the standard Radeon HD 4870 is not too far behind it. Yet the Radeon costs less than $300, while the GTX 280 is selling for roughly $450, giving AMD some generous pricing headroom to play with.

So, trying to make the most of this situation, for $559 AMD has come up with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which follows the same premise of previous generation X2 cards, taking two of the latest Radeon GPUs and sticking them on a single PCB. A terrifying prospect given the power of today’s graphics processors. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 boasts an enviable combined processing power of 2.4TFLOPS, 60 Gtexels/s of bilinear filtering, and courtesy of some highly clocked GDDR5 memory, 230GB/s of memory bandwidth.

https://www.techspot.com/review/113-radeon-4870-x2/

Please leave your feedback here. Thanks!

 

[Nirkon]

Yay you improved the benchmark images!
It was much easier and much more comfortable to find the card that was being reviewed and also the other cards as well, as they were also from highest fps to lowest fps.

This review helped me quite a bit as well, since next week I'll be upgrading to the hd4850, which this review proved that with AA, it passed the 9800gtx and 9800GTX+, and its also 30 bucks cheaper!

As for the hd4870x2, its a hell of a card, as well of as the gtx 280, time to crank up the AA

 

[DaMak420]

Nice review.

I skimmed some, and loved the benchmark results... VERY easy to read.

I didn't notice.... does this card suffer from the same MAJOR flaw (IMO) as all of the "X2" cards... in that there really isnt any good multi-display support?

I know it CAN be done, but then you are really using each gpu on its own, and not together as one card....

I am under the impression that Crossfire suffers from this issue as well as SLI... althought with crossfire, or SLI, you have to run a 3rd video card completely to have a secondary display....

 

[Star*Dagger]

@deMak To the best of my knowledge Crossfire supports multi monitors and SLI does not.

@ reviewer
I really dont know how you could recommend the 280 or 4870 after such a stomping performance by the 4870x2
The 280 is already old news and though the 4870 is a fine card, what will said gamer do in a year when it doesn't have the legs to really run next years games. You mentioned price, but in a year, or even less, said gamer will have to upgrade.

Though the 4870x2s price seems "extreme", you will enjoy alot of very high fps games from now until your next upgrade, cutting out mid-life upgrades by buying extreme now.

As far as the driver issue, while it is true that ATI has to write drivers to get the fullest effect, these guys are not asleep at the wheel. They 1) now have the fastest graphics card on the planet 2) are committed to supporting it, because if they don't nvidia will get the top crown again.

There was a very recent catalyst update right around the release of Warhead.

All I can say is that you would have to pry the 4870x2 from my hot dead fingers (warning: any actual touching of the 4870x2 with bare hands might result in burns, lol)

S*D

 

[DaMak420]

@ Star

Everything I have read is that both crossfire and SLI will NOT support dual monitors.

See this - http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/252667-33-dual-monitor-4870cross-fire-9600gt-possible
as recently as July this year, confirmed.

You CAN with both setups run a 3rd independant card for the second monitor, but the crossfire/SLI can NOT do it alone.

Based on some other info I have picked up, is that there IS support from the X2 cards (single) for dual monitors.

 

[Star*Dagger]

OK, fair enough, as long as my card can do it, lol.

Thanks for the research, I have been wondering about that myself.

S*D