Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Crossfire review - 1 - Meet the triplet

Ah yes, it's August 12th anno 2008, the day that AMD officially releases it's ATI Radeon 4800 X2 series. Hey and welcome people. Today we have got lots of good stuff to tell you. Now I don't know if you read our Radeon HD 4870 X2 preview, but we covered a lot of the groundwork in that article already. Obviously there's more to tell as there's not just one product being launched, it's actually two.

The two products will be Radeon HD 4850 X2 and the Radeon HD 4870 X2. The new products will officially kick NVIDIA from their high-end crown, purely based on performance with a single board product. Armed with a batter of features, a pretty nice design and very okay thermals, we'll fill in all the details for you in this review.

For those of you who lived under a rock and do not know what the X2 actually stands for, it's as simple as it sounds. X2 is times two .. these products are based on multiple GPUs per graphics card. In essence you take a large PCB (printed circuit board), position two 4850 or 4870 processors with an interconnect bridge-chip, grab a handful of memory chips, and then a pinch of resistors and mosfets. You put it in the pan, stir it and voilla ... your serving is ready. That's your X2. Our preview already gave you guys a pretty decent overview of what to expect from these products, and let me tell you .. it's a really mean product series man. These puppies run fast!

Obviously we'll tell you all about specifications and pricing, but there is again something else we really wanted to test for you as when you buy an X2 product (2 GPUs) it is possible to pair it up with yet another X2 card. So today we'll cover all the bases from these two cards, and then take two 4870 X2 boards to have a look at CrossFireX performance; we're going X4 man!

So head on over to the next page where we'll startup this far-reaching review, with the help of reference samples, and actually a retail sample from the folks over at Powercolor. Let the splendor begin!