AMD announced its plans to release the Radeon HD 4870 X2 quite a while ago, and today marks the official launch of the behemoth. The card was meant to bring the company back on top of the graphics cards market, and it seems that it is more than fit for its purpose. It packs up two GPUs on the same PCB, offers more power than a single GPU graphics card and also has a rather convenient price. AMD kept its promise made when the card was first spoken about.
The specifications sheet of the card does not come short, but many details on it have already been presented
in our
previous article on today's launch. There are still a few things to add, and some of them will be shortly noted here. The main achievement of this card, in comparison with its predecessor, the Radeon HD 3870X2, is the highly increased interconnect bandwidth, which reaches now 21.8GB/s, three times more than the previous card.
The secret behind this speed is a new generation 2 switch and a sideport interface that comes with the 4870X2. Although there are no current applications that will benefit from the sideport, AMD says that they will be developed in the future, meaning that there will be performance increase in certain stream computing applications. It should be the case to do so, as the card is able to offer up to 2.4 terraflops of compute power.
The guys from
HotHardware managed to get two 4870X2 cards in their labs for testing purposes, one from Palit and the other from HIS. ATI designed its card to have a pair of dual-link DVI outputs, and an HD video output. An included adapter allows for one of the DVI outputs to be turned into an HDMI output. HotHardware says that the HIS card came with a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, as well as with a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a drive CD and manuals, a CrossFire bridge connector, an S-Video to composite adapter, an HD component output dongle, a Molex-to-PCI Express power adapter and an HIS case badge.
The tests were conducted on an ASUS P5E3 Premium motherboard, on a system running Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, the latest DX10 redist and various hotfixes, along with the necessary drivers and applications. On the 3DMark06 test, the 4870X2s outperformed almost all the other cards, and the CrossFire configuration marks the best overall score. That means that future overclocked cards that are likely to appear will register even better results.
The 3DMark Vantage results also place the new 4870X2 cards amongst the first, outpaced only by the combination of 3 Nvidia GPUs working under SLI mode. The CrossFire configuration nears the 3-way SLI, although it does not outperform it, but leaves far behind all the other cards. The Half Life 2: Episode 2 puts the cards on top of the list, but Unreal Tournament 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Crysis do not scale up so good on them.
When it comes to video playback performance, the cards near the maximum score, registering 128 points out of 130. The CPU utilization is a low one, even when an unencrypted HD video clip is played. Although the encrypted videos use more CPU, the cards should have no problems playing back high def digital video.
The power consumption goes to high values when the CrossFire configuration is used. Also, the cards run really hot, registering 90 degrees Celsius under load and 80 degrees when idling. The cooler also seems to get a little louder when the card is under load, but the noise level is similar to that of other high-end graphics cards.
The overall performance level of 4870X2, says HotHardware, is on par with a Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup, and outperformed other cards easily. The behemoth is capable of outpacing the best cards Nvidia currently has on its offer. The true performance of the card resides in the way the drivers scale on particular games, and, as long as ATI's driver team keeps working on providing support for the latest games, the card will remain on the top of 3D graphics for quite a while.
