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AMD Finally Officiates 4870 X2 Launch
Posted 08/12/08 at 11:50:11 AM | by Paul Lilly
Not 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
Comments Print Email 2x1GB GDDR5
Submitted by skhills on Thu, 2008-08-14 11:16
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.
I'd like to see some hard
Submitted by sirphunkee on Wed, 2008-08-13 09:20
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
Submitted by roninnder on Tue, 2008-08-12 22:23
That's not what officiate means. Get less stupid today at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/officiate.
It's official!
Submitted by One4yu2c on Tue, 2008-08-12 23:22
What I really wanted to go with was AMD Finally Officialifies 4870 X2.
Intel....whatever...this is
Submitted by gatorXXX on Tue, 2008-08-12 17:41
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!
Submitted by skhills on Tue, 2008-08-12 11:11
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.
Submitted by majorsuave on Tue, 2008-08-12 10:05
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.
"a single 4870 X2 churned
Submitted by johnny3144 on Tue, 2008-08-12 17:38
"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?
Submitted by One4yu2c on Tue, 2008-08-12 19:11
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.
Submitted by Scapegoat on Tue, 2008-08-12 12:15
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.
2 processors to beat one
Submitted by bandeezee on Tue, 2008-08-12 10:31
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.
Submitted by pellier on Tue, 2008-08-12 10:20
cake is so delicous and moist
Submitted by X1300 Pro on Tue, 2008-08-12 10:27
The cake is a lie....
Submitted by pellier on Tue, 2008-08-12 19:05
yes butit doesn't hurt to keep trying until you run out of cake
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