AMD plans to take back the No 1 spot in the graphics card market. We find out if they are able to do it with the new Dual GPU HD 4870 X2 which has just been released.
NVIDIA is yet to talk about releasing another dual GPU card to replace the 9800 GX2, but from the word go AMD has said that the HD 4870 X2 was coming, which is great for people who want to get into the dual GPU scene but don’t have a compatible motherboard.
Like the HD 3870 X2, the new model is really two of AMD's highest-end single GPU graphics cards moulded onto a single PCB. Stream processors are 800 x 2, texture units come in at 40 x 2 and ROPs are 16 x 2. The memory bus for the card is 256-bit x 2 and the transistor count is 956 million x 2. The two cores also run on the same 55nm technology seen in the HD 4870.
Like the HD 4870 our two cores both come in at 750MHz each, while the two lots of 1GB GDDR5 come clocked at the same 900MHz (3,600MHz Data Rate). Unlike the HD 3870 X2, which had its clocks slightly dropped when compared to the reference HD 3870, AMD has kept the same clocks for both the X2 variant and the single core version this time around.
Powering the card are two connectors, just like the standard HD 4870. What differs, though, is instead of a dual 6-pin connector configuration, AMD has opted for the single 8-pin connector and single 6-pin connector setup, which has become more common with the higher-end cards such as the GTX 280 from NVIDIA.
Inside the box, Sapphire has included the standard driver CD and manual. Also inside we have Ruby ROM Volume 1, Cyberlink’s DVD Suite and Power DVD, along with an Advanced Edition version of 3DMark Vantage with a key provided. The cable department is pretty standard with two power convertors, component-out dongle, S-Video to RCA connector, CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA connector and DVI to HDMI connector.
Once we'd slid the single card into our test system and fired up some of our benchmarks, what we generally found was a card that performed slightly better than a pair of HD 4870s. This is thanks to the decreased latency between the two chips talking to each other, as a CrossFire bridge is not needed. The results for the card are very consistent, with it always beating out the HD 4870 CrossFire setup in games like Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis.
With a second card in hand, it was time to test what four GPUs were capable of. Firing up Vantage greeted us with an error and 3DMark06 was also a bit unstable at times. The games it did pass like Crysis, UT3, and World in Conflict didn’t see any real gains with the additional card. An extra fps or two here and there, but that was really about it. There certainly wasn’t enough of an increase to justify the cost of a second card.
With that said, though, we’re still running on very early drivers and AMD have really begun to work on improving Crossfire performance with upcoming drivers. For the most part the HD 4870 X2 is also faster than the GTX 280, which does make it the fastest single card on the market at the moment.
The HD 4870 X2 will be a great-selling product thanks to the popularity AMD has gained in its graphics card division over the past few months. People who bought P35 or P45 motherboards which don’t support dual x16 slots (rather, a x16 / x4 configuration) will be glad to know they can have the same Crossfire performance as someone with a more expensive X38 or X48 motherboard which does carry dual x16 slots.
The problem with dual GPU cards at launch has always been driver optimisation when adding more than a single card into the mix. The HD 4870 X2 this time around is really no different, with the same instability issues seen in a Crossfire X setup. With that said, though, if you’re looking for the fastest single graphics card to sit in your P45 based motherboard that overclocks well, the HD 4870 X2 is an excellent choice. The main thing you have to remember about this kind of graphics card is that in so many games you become CPU limited. While 3GHz does seem like a lot, at this speed you’re still not really letting the card show its full potential. Grabbing an E8600 and raising the front side bus to 400MHz to give you a 4GHz stock clock yields big gains in a number of games. If you have even more money to spend, you can’t go wrong with the QX series of Intel processors.
The only way we can see NVIDIA really coming out to constantly beat out the HD 4870 X2 is with the release of a dual GPU GTX 280, which doesn’t seem likely since there’s been absolutely nothing about it in the rumour mill. AMD has done a great job with the HD 4870 X2 and it does seem like they’re on a bit of a roll at the moment. Hopefully they'll continue with this momentum and we'll begin to see some real competition for NVIDIA once again. For now, we'd probably try and avoid a Crossfire X HD 4870 X2 setup due to the driver support, but if you’re looking for a single card that performs extremely well, you really can’t go past the HD 4870 X2.