Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB Video Card Review

The New and Improved ATI Lineup

Well, here we have it: the lineup that is supposed to put the hurt on the competition while keeping the overall costs per card down to appealing levels. At the top of the heap we have the new HD4870 X2 while a little further down is the upcoming HD4850 X2 and the rest of the previously released cards nicely round everything up. Without releasing an overly confusing lineup, ATI has perfectly covered nearly every portion of the market with one card or another which basically means that if you have a certain budget, ATI has you covered.


While it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the new “R700” (or Spartan as it is called internally by ATI) is in fact a dual GPU card much like the bygone HD3870 X2, what may interest you is that it comes with a full 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Looking a bit closer at the HD4870 X2 we can see that what has been done is to take a pair of cores from standard HD4870 cards, pair up each with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and stick the whole kit and caboodle onto one PCB. This gives the new X2 the distinction of being the first consumer-oriented graphics card to sport 2GB of memory. Even though it may seem to have a somewhat limited 256-bit bus, this card more than makes up for it with its blisteringly-fast GDDR5 speeds. Other than that, all of the clock speeds are carbon copied over from a stock HD4870 card which further cements out assumption that this dual chip card will perform nearly identical to Crossfired HD4870s.

What strikes us as the most interesting about all of these specifications is the fact that ATI seems to have found enough stock of GDDR5 to provide modules to their rollout of HD4870 X2 and HD4870 cards. There were rumors a little while ago that stock of GDDR5 was hard to maintain and ATI would have issues keeping up with demand for their cards. Well, with the big three players (Samsung, Qimonda and Hynix) all producing decent volumes of the needed ICs it seems these rumored shortages never amounted to anything.

As for the HD4850 X2, it is the mirror image of its big brother but combines the same cores with slower GDDR3 memory clocked at the same speeds as a standard HD4850. As such, it is supposed to be priced a full $150 below the HD4870 X2 at about $400 but this can change quite a bit depending on what the board partners decide to do with their custom cards. Like we said before, there is no “official” launch date for this card but it is supposed to compete directly with the GTX 280. The major issue we see with this is the fact that manufacturer-specific cards like this (anyone remember the almost nonexistent stock of the HD3850 X2?) is that stock is usually next to impossible to come by and because of this prices are usually inflated. Hopefully, this time it will be different since at $400 this card would have a great following since it seems to hit at the right price point while giving increased performance for those of you who don’t have a Crossfire motherboard.

*Please note that programs like GPU-Z and the Catalyst Control Center will read the memory speed as 900Mhz due to the fact that GDDR5 operates different from all other DDR memory types. Basically, there are two “banks” of memory each operating at 900Mhz SDR (1800Mhz DDR) and these programs will only read one of these banks. The two banks combine for a total of 3600Mhz DDR memory speed.