October 1st, 2008
BootDaily ASUS Radeon 4870X2
I make no secret about it – I’m really digging on the latest 4800-series GPUs from AMD/ATI. They present the best value in 3D acceleration today and do so by offering the best performance at their respective prices – add in the fact that they also support DX10.1 and you have the makings for a top-to-bottom line-up of a can of 3D whoop-ass.
AMD released this new series of GPUs back in June and hasn’t looked back since that time – we’ve known this day was coming for awhile and the entire industry knew as well. Today is the official release date of the Radeon 4870X2 card and the reason it’s cool is that now you have a single graphics card which slaps on two GPUs and two gigabytes of GDDR5 memory for what makes up the fastest single card solution available at a price that’s sure to drive NVIDIA to drop its prices on the 280GTX card.
In the end, this means that you can go out today and buy two of these cards in order to run a quad-crossfire configuration. The X2 card uses a PCI-E 2.0 bridge chip to run a seamless crossfire setup on the card that’s completely transparent to the end-user. We’ve seen similar configurations on previous generations of video cards from both AMD and NVIDIA, however, this is the first one from AMD to use a PCI-E 2.0 bridge which provides additional bandwidth for the GPUs.
