Date:
Monday , July 14, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
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AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Preview

We have an exclusive early look at AMD’s new ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 to be launched later this summer. We will take a look at the 4870 X2 in a CrossFireX configuration as well, and evaluate gameplay in Crysis and Age of Conan with several apples-to-apples tests. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see 8X AA playable at 2560x1600 and 24X CFAA playable at 1920x1200.

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System Test Setup

We will be using a quad-core CPU based platform with the EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and an ASUS P5E3-Premium CrossFire Motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs.

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Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3GHz to 3.66GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce CPU limitations.

For the BFGTech GeForce GTX 280 OC we are using ForceWare 177.41 and testing both single and SLI performance on the EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard.

For the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 and CrossFireX we are testing with the latest beta driver provided by AMD, you can see a screenshot of the version above. We are testing the 4870 X2 in single and CrossFireX configurations on the ASUS P5E3-Premium motherboard.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page.