1 - Introduction

No year has been better for AMD's ATI than 2008, their products kick ass at a reasonable price. What more do we want? Well euhm .. two? So ATI went to work, designed this big'ass printed circuit board, slapped on two processors and a huge cooler, and called it the Radeon HD 4870 X2.

Though no-body really knows where the 4850 X2 cards really are, the AIBs (board partners like HIS, TUL, Palit, Force3D), happily purchase the 4870 X2 cards from ATI. They slap a sticker on top of it, combine it with a friendly bundle and then preferably sell it at good volume and margins. This is how today's high-end segment works.

Fact is, as expensive the 4870 X2 really is, it is by far the most popular 'high-end' graphics card on the market today. It's definitely has a few negatives ... but overall the positives are in the vast majority. See, once you get a game working with the 2 GPUs you have 1600 tiny little sub-processors on that X2 hauling ass on your frame rate, and that's the success of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 .. incredible 3D computing performance -- RAW power. Now, you'd think that the 4870 X2 has been around for ages, yet the reality is that it was released on August 12th 2008 only. That's how much of an impact the product really made, impressive to say at the least.

Obviously HIS technology jumped that bandwagon as well, and though we regret to not see a customized cooler on this product, it once again managed to impress us very much.

Check her out, and then let's hit the road and take this X2 for a wild ride.