14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has put a lot of work into the newest Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics board in its attempt to make it the next true high-end card. At least, when it comes to the company's graphics product line, this card goes straight to the top. As showed before, Radeon HD 4870X2 pairs RV770 GPUs on the same PCB, and features high-speed GDDR5 memory for quick memory access. Since the card promises so much, other manufacturers have started making their own 4870X2 based cards, adding few more features to differentiate them from the stock.
Diamond Radeon HD 4870X2 2GB is one of these new cards, and it looks like one user from xtremesystems managed to get his hands on it and to make some overclocking tests. It seems that the card features the same stock frequencies as the Radeon HD 4870 one, although we should mention that Diamond announced its XOC version of the card with higher operating frequencies. Also, the company said the card would allow higher overclocking rates than any Radeon HD 4870 board on the market.
In order to get the frequency of the card up, the Xtreme user, called guess2098, had to undergo some BIOS modifications. This way, the core clock has been set at 850MHz, while the memory one went to 4000MHz. It is also worth mentioning that the tested card does not feature the usual Qimonda GDDR5 memory chips, but has Hynix memory instead. It hasn't been determined yet which of these are faster, but time will tell. Also, partners are able to choose the memory type they like.
The testing results of the Radeon HD 4870X2 equal those that would be showed when testing two Radeon HD 4870 in CrossFire. It is unclear at this moment which of the results rise higher, and some direct comparison is required. The idea is that the card performs in the 3DMark applications as 4870 CrossFire. Previous test results showed the same thing, which means that AMD kept its promise for the new card.
While waiting for the official release of the Radeon HD 4870X2, we still have time to think about the Hynix GDDR5 chips and their performance levels, as it is already known that Qimonda ones can easily get to 4800MHz.
