Image Quality

As we have said so many times before, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Rather than tell you what looks good and what doesn't check out the two screen shots from Assassin's Creed and UT3 both with max settings at 1920x1440 resolution.

Overclocking

The factory clock settings of the GPU and GDDR5 memory respectively are 750MHz and 3.6GHz.  Using the Catalyst Control Panel and its 'Auto Tune' feature to begin with, we prodded our way to find a tentative maximum overclock.  When I say to tentative, I mean that I have never found the 'Auto Tune' feature to be completely reliable.  Sure, it will find a minimally stable overclock but stable for five minutes doesn't count in my book.  Stable means at least half an hour and I say that because, my thinking is that after 30 minutes of heat, if it doesn't lock up, it's not going to.  So, prodding along we found a maximum ceiling of 790MHz on the core and 3.86GHz on the memory.  Not a bad gain.  Rerunning a few benchmarks we didn't see enough of a difference to even make it worth while to graph though.

Conclusion

So here we are.  We have a $550 video card that plays two of our three games no better than its single GPU sibling, the HD4870.  This is terrible right?  Wrong.  Let's look back at the Crysis benchmarks.  Now if you plan on running some older games at lower resolutions, this is not a card for you.  However, the more demanding games at higher resolutions and FSAA maxed out will really shine with the added power of the second GPU.  Sure, I'm extrapolating a lot from the Crysis results but this is a good indicator of the longevity and frag power of the HD4870x2.  Add in the HDMI 7.1 audio, Blue-Ray and HD Video support and you really have a card that no one would be ashamed of.  Order up two and you can take things to an entirely new dimension.

We weren't especially crazy about how hot the card ran but the heat issues with the HD4800 series cards is nothing new.  Again, I fully expect to see HIS apply some of their cooling talents to this monster card making it really stand out from the rest of the field of HD4870x2 cards out there.  If you have the funds and the desire to run at the head of the pack the HD4870x2 is for you.  HIS offers a fine example of this ground shaking card.  You can find the HIS HD4870x2 on sale now at NewEgg here.  Thanks go out to HIS for sponsoring this review.

Pros

• This card proves ATi is very much in the game

• Excellent performance especially with FSAA and at high resolutions

• Very good image quality

• Supports Blu-Ray and HD Video

• HDMI 7.1 Audio

• CrossFireX ready

Cons

• Runs hot

• Street price of $550

BACK                    HOME

Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card/Installation/Noise
Pg. 3 - Test Bed/Benchmarks
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks
Pg. 5 - Image Quality/Overclocking/Conclusion