AMD’s next big thing: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2

NVIDIA may be sticking to monolithic graphic cards, but AMD sure as hell isn’t. In fact you probably were one of hundreds of thousands who guessed that after releasing the sweetly-priced Radeon HD 4870, they’d be back with twins. If you banked money on that, you’d better collect – Guru3D says they’ve just received the prototype of the top-of-the-line, dual-GPU RV770-spec graphics card that’s tied to just one generic name: the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. Wipe off the drool, and get more details at the full story.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be hitting the market soon, but will it follow in the footsteps of its sweetly-priced Radeon HD 4870 and 4850? As the tech-heads from Guru3D would have it, it could be a candidate for your next uber CrossFire setup.

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 not only packs double the RV770-spec chips, it also houses video RAM increased to about the same factor – only this time, all of the 2048 MB (2 GB) memory is GDDR5-rated RAM at an effective clock rate of 3600 MHz (900 MHz base clock) .

The computing power of the HD 4870 X2 is simple mathematics: if the ordinary HD 4870’s 750 MHz core chip churns at 1,200 GigaFLOPS, the HD 4870 X2 – which packs double 750 MHz cores – runs at an effective 2,400 GigaFLOPS. Not bad, now that Microsoft’s DirectX 11 is about to take advantage of the processing power of idle GPUs.

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 also packs double the streaming processing units, which accounts for a lot. It’s just that one of these cards is bound to suck your laden machine dry of juice – one HD 4870 X2 on a fully loaded system contribute to the demand for 448 Watts of power.

CrossFire isn’t as power-hungry, but it still extracts as much as 480 Watts from your PCI-E 1.2-spec power. Idle ratings seem to dip to at least 260 Watts on a single HD 4870 X2.

But that’s not to say that the ATi’s video card doesn’t run hot like a nuclear power rod. In fact, the Radeon HD 4870 X2’s chip temperatures average at about 85 degrees Celsius in-between – some 92 degrees Celsius if crunching some graphics-heavy computations.
 
Fan RPM doesn’t seem to be in there, but noise factor has been detailed. On full, the fan noise should toss hums at you in varying decibels, somewhere in the mid-40 range. The card also sports the usual double DVI output interface, plus the old TV-out connector at back, and there’s no indication that an HDMI connection will be tossed in their somewhere.

Now don’t take all these data as if they were written in stone – most of the data, while empirical, has been highly depended on the early engineering samples provided to several reputable review sites. Many believe that the final version might sport a few adjustments, and that is subject to review. More updates on the bleeding edge of technology as we get them.

• XNA Gamefest 2008: Microsoft presents DirectX 11 for Vista, future versions of Windows
• Diamond unleashes ATI Radeon HD 4870 card
• AMD launches GAME! platform: hardware certification program
• Dell, AMD to launch new OptiPlex 740 series

Via Guru3D