Introduction

For the past couple of years, we've been dished out a nearly daily meal of doom predictions for AMD. Those predictions escalated with AMD's acquisition of ATI. I read many of these articles in the beginning, hoping for a glimpse of some kind of inside information of what was really happening at AMD. I soon realized that most of these articles were being written by Intel and nVidia fanboys, who knew no more about AMD's current situation than the rest of us, and were gleefully making unfounded predictions of AMD's demise. I stopped reading them a long time ago.

AMD has truly had some problems in their CPU division. I don't claim to know what the future holds for them, I hope they survive and do well, if for no other reason I feel that Intel should have some competition. AMD has built some awesome processors, and though the Phenom isn't quite what many expected, I'm not prepared to write them off.

Their ATI division is a different story. The Radeon HD 3850 and HD 3870 were both excellent cards, and gave us a glimpse of where ATI was headed, smaller graphics processors with awesome capabilities, one GPU not only for multiple models of cards, but one for both mid-range and upper-range video cards.

The HD 3850 was initially overlooked, probably due to its release price being at least $50 more than its closest geForce competition, the 8600GTS. There was no real comparison between the two, as the 3850 totally blew away the geForce midrange card; its performance was much closer to the 8800GT, which had yet to be released. The card received much more attention after the price dropped to sub-$200 levels, and proved to be a strong competition to the newly released 9600GT.

The HD 3870 received more attention earlier in its run, partially due to the fact that there was no geForce model in the same price range at the time, and partially due to the interest in the HD 3870 X2. The HD 3870 X2 was truly a wonder, and I suspect that it, the flexibility of CrossFireX along with the loss of the rear jumper cables and the addition of the CrossFire bridge, and the inclusion of CrossFire support on Intel chipsets lured many more enthusiasts to ATI than nVidia would like to admit.

ATI has recently released the Radeon 4000 series, consisting of the HD 4850 and HD 4870. There is really no comparison with the 3000 series. This card's performance rivals the geforce 9800GTX, which was the most powerful single GPU video card on the market a matter of months ago, with the 4850's release price being under $200.

Today I will be looking at ATI's most recent release, the Radeon HD 4870 X2. I can't quite imagine the performance capacity of a pair of HD 4850s, so I really have no idea what to expect from twin 4870s, complete with two full gigs of DDR5 memory. This will be my first ATI-branded Radeon card, which will make things even more interesting. Will the 4870 X2 offer the ultimate 3D graphics experience? Read on to see!

Packaging

I received the evaluation HD 4870 X2 directly from Canada in carrier packaging rather than retail packaging, and included was a basic bundle with no driver disk, which I seldom use anyway, preferring to get the latest drivers from AMD's website. Purchasing the card will get you retail packaging and a complete bundle.