AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB Preview - R700 a bit early

Today's preview of the HD 4870 X2 card from AMD proves that this time AMD was planning ahead. Our review of the RV770-based Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 cardsshowed the new GPU architecture to be very potent indeed and NVIDIA is very scared of what the dual-GPU version, known as R700 previously, would do to its line of cards. Today we were allowed to post a short "preview" of the card's performance and I have to say you will likely be impressed.

In our email about this preview AMD asked for us to "keep this high level and not go deep on the architecture" since they were "leaving something for the full NDA" at a later date. Hmmm....okay how's this:

• Two GPUs
• One board
• Radeon HD 4870 cores
• PCIe v1.1 bridge chip
• GDDR5 memory
• HD 4870 clock speeds
• 512MB buffer to each GPU for 1GB total
• 1x8-pin PCIe and 1x6-pin PCIe power connectors
• Remember the HD 3870 X2 design? Yeah, pretty much like that.

The card continues in the tradition of long PCBs, matching the size of the HD 3870 X2 as well as the 9800 GX2 and 9800 GTX designs. The cooler for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is of course a two slot design.

Though there are some bugs on the GPU-Z screen shot, you can see that the core clock is running at 750 MHz while the GDDR5 memory is running at 900 MHz- the same speeds the single GPU HD 4870 512MB card runs at. AMD is obviously serious about getting as much performance out of their GPUs as possible and would we would likely see an HD 4850 X2 card at some point too - much like we saw the HD 3850 X2 1GB card from ASUS this year.

Let's see some performance numbers from this new card:

Yes, I know we only got to test three games and 3DMark Vantage for our quick preview of the R700 technology, but I simply get away without saying that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB was staggeringly fast. At our top testing resolutions the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB card was just outclassed by the new AMD card. Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis all saw significant playability increases with the R700 compared to the GTX 280 at 2560x1600 and in a couple of cases at 2048 or 1900 resolutions as well.

Pricing and Availability

Since this is a preview of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB card, AMD didn't want us to talk about pricing, availability or anything relating to their business strategy for the card. However, in some slides that they had already released to us during the RV770 launch we learned that the R700 should be coming in mid-Q3 and will have a ">$500" price point. That puts the card to be on shelves by the end of August with a price over $500 - considering the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB cards just dropped to $499 literally weeks after their release, NVIDIA is aware of the performance of the card as well.

Initial Thoughts

While it is hard to get a complete outlook of AMD's new Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB card with three games and some 3DMark Vantage numbers, our initial outlook for it is very, very good. If those idle power numbers can be improved upon with the updated PowerPlay BIOS as AMD claims, it will be very difficult to find weaknesses in AMD's new flagship product. The only exception might be the scalability concerns we mentioned above - that's up to AMD's software team to keep up with the PC titles as they arrive. Of course final pricing and availability are the real keys to a successful launch but as it stands now, if the Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB were selling for ~$500 today it would have our full recommendation. Full story at PCPer.....