Posted 01/10/09 at 12:20:37 PM by Will Smith

The 4870 X2 outperformed the previous single-card performance champ in most of our benchmarks, delivering playable frame rates at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 in nearly every game we tested. Naturally, the exception remains Crysis, which, at its highest quality settings, punishes nearly every system we’ve tested. We’re slightly concerned about the accuracy of our Crysis benchmarks; the ATI card seemed to render far-off textures at a higher resolution than the Nvidia card.

As always with high-end cards, if you’re running a low-resolution display—pretty much anything below 1920x1200—you won’t be able to harness the full power of this card. At lower resolutions, the 4870 X2 performs exactly the same as the single-GPU 4870. For anyone running a high-res panel, the X2 truly kicks ass.

Read on for the rest of the review!

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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.

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