ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 in mid-Q3 ?

It is rumored that an AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 dual-GPU graphics card will be released with an arrival in mid-Q3 2008 and that it will be cheaper than a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 graphics card.

Much like the last-gen products ATI seems to bridge two chips on one PCB. The big downside to this is that the card will be dependent on the drivers as it uses ATI's multi-GPU solution CrossFireX for linking the performance of the two GPUs, and the drivers is suppose to be one of the bigger reasons AMD is holding off the launch until mid-Q3. The other reason is that AMD wants to make sure that it can pump out enough regular Radeon HD 4870 cards first without the GDDR5 supply becoming an issue.

AMD believes that 4870 and 4850 are the cards that will hurt NVIDIA the most.

If the supply of GDDR5 chips is solid, or at least sufficient, and the drivers are adequate, AMD will present its new flagship in August at a price which is below that of NVIDIA's flagship product GeForce GTX 280. Stories are going around that it could be anywhere between $450-550. Even though it uses two chips, it is suppose to be a Cool N' Quiet card. We say that knowing that the cooler isn't even finished yet, but we also know that AMD has no intention of launching a card that runs hot and makes a lot of noise, and that the previous generation cooler was a rather good one.