AMD Finally Officiates 4870 X2 Launch
PrintNot without their share of pre-release hype, AMD's 4870 X2 videocards lived up to every bit of it by obliterating the competition in this year's Dream Machine (a single 4870 X2 churned out twice as many frames as Nvidia's GTX280 in 3DMark Vantage). And they did it months before they were supposed to go public, which means there were architectural tweaks yet to be made.
The wait is over, and at long last, AMD has finally announced what it rightfully calls the world's fastest graphics card, the ATI Radeon 4870 X2. Built on a 55nm manufacturing process, the dual-GPU videocard comes with the computational muscle to deliver 2.4 teraFLOPS, and ATI can still lay claim as the only manufacturer to support DirectX 10.1 instructions. Rounding out the feature-set, the 4870 X2 ships with 2GB GDDR5, 1600 stream processors, and a 750MHz core clockspeed (reference). MSRP has been set to $549 with stock available now.
AMD also made mention of it's upcoming 4850 X2 videocard. As the name implies, this card will also be a dual-GPU solution (clocked at 625MHz), and like it's bigger brother it will come with 1600 stream processors. Instead of GDDR5, the 4850 X2 will ship with 2GB of GDDR3. Look for availability this September with an estimated sub-$400 street price.
Image Credit: AMD
More like this
skhills
August 14, 2008 at 10:16am
Keep in mind that according to the Dream Machine issue of Maximum PC that uses these cards, each GPU requires a copy of the exact same data, so you effectively get the performance of 1 GB total memory.
sirphunkee
August 13, 2008 at 8:20am
I'd like to see some hard numbers that show exactly how much performance delta there is with that j-lo-ass of a frame buffer
roninnder
August 12, 2008 at 9:23pm
That's not what officiate means. Get less stupid today at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/officiate.
Paul_Lilly
August 12, 2008 at 10:22pm
What I really wanted to go with was AMD Finally Officialifies 4870 X2.
gatorXXX
August 12, 2008 at 4:41pm
Intel....whatever...this is about ATI/AMD. I'm also glad to see them finally take the crown whether it's one gpu or two. Doesn't matter. If you can slap 2 gpu's on a single pcb, biotch slap nvidia with it, produce better performance than it's competitor with lower power consumption, I'm all for it! WHEN I SAY ATI, YOU SAY RULES..............ATI....you know the hillshire farms commercial....say it!!! You know you wanna!
skhills
August 12, 2008 at 10:11am
I would normally agree that a dual GPU card is inferior to a single GPU card for a given performance level, but when nVidia makes a die 6 times bigger than a Penryn CPU and consuming over 250 watts under load the single GPU benefits disappear fast. We've already seen the diminishing returns of Phenom CPU's claiming paper superiority as a native quad-core, but intel's cooler-running, better performing dual die approach winning out.
majorsuave
August 12, 2008 at 9:05am
I am pleased to see ATI take the crown back, although it needs 2 processors to beat one.
Any shift in momentum is good for us the users. Let's hope AMD can repeat itself on the CPU front in the near future and there will be cake.
johnny3144
August 12, 2008 at 4:38pm
"a single 4870 X2 churned out twice as many frames as Nvidia's GTX280 in 3DMark Vantage"
doesn't this mean 4870 X2 = atleast two 280GTX? and we know that SLi isn't double performance.... so a 4870 X2 = Tri-SLi 280GTX?
Paul_Lilly
August 12, 2008 at 6:11pm
Keep in mind that 3DMark Vantage is a synthetic benchmark and not always indicative of real-world performance. When getting into real-world gaming applications, you aren't likely to see the 4870 X2 beat the GTX280 by the same margin across the board, and depending on the game, it might even be slower in some cases.
Scapegoat
August 12, 2008 at 11:15am
God bless America, thank you for giving us another top of the line, best of the best ATi videocard!! This has to be good news for the future of AMD.
bandeezee
August 12, 2008 at 9:31am
It may have taken ATI 2 processors to beat one, but this card seems to be about the same size as the GX 280 so there really doesn't seem to be a disadvantage of having 2 processors on one card compared to the gigantic single processor card by nvidia. I hope this card doesn't have the finicky driver problems I've had in the past with ATI cards. I too am glad to see ATI back on top.
Connect with MaximumPC
Featured Content
We introduce Intel's latest class of tablet killers and review 4 of the first Ultra...
Where have all the memorable videogame enemies gone?
This month's issue
Feature
11 Hardware Hacks
Feature
Overclock Your CPU
How-To
Supercharge Your Smartphone
Build It
A Powerful $830 Rig
Most Commented Articles
Latest Max PC Tweets
- maximumpc: Analysts: 9-Inch Kindle Fire This Summer http://t.co/QDYApwCZ3 hours 4 min ago
- maximumpc: Micron: DRAM Prices Likely as Low as They're Going to Get http://t.co/fFUWuFOm6 hours 2 min ago
- maximumpc: Yar, Mateys! All Of Pirate Bay Made Available As A Single 90MB Zip File http://t.co/j5LHlXEZ7 hours 15 min ago
