Reviews - Sapphire AMD (ATI) Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB: opening up a can of whoop-ass

[HEXUS]

The world's fastest graphics card?

Read more.

[Applecrusher]

i wants me one!!

Still have a 3870X2 sitting round and my 4870..

Need to stop wasting money!!

EDIT: Also.. Any idea on what that other link will being in terms of performance? EG: another 10 - 20%?

[PROJECT2501]

I've got me a Sapphire 4870 as my 3870X2 went up the spout.

Does anyone know if I'll see similar performance if I Xfire another 4870 in on an X38 Mobo or does the X2 contain some sort of secret magic which makes it better than the sum of its parts?

Well, I could always get an X2 for triple Xfire. Damn, another month without food...

[MSIC]

Contrary to the observations above, and appreciating how few readers have 30in, 2,560x1,600-capable panels,

Is it about time that you did another poll (i know i could do one, but you'd get more response...)?
I remember one here a couple of years ago, but things have changed alot, widescreen monitors may be up to 50% of Hexus readers now....

[Tarinder]

I've got me a Sapphire 4870 as my 3870X2 went up the spout.

Does anyone know if I'll see similar performance if I Xfire another 4870 in on an X38 Mobo or does the X2 contain some sort of secret magic which makes it better than the sum of its parts?

Well, I could always get an X2 for triple Xfire. Damn, another month without food...

There's no secret magic as such, PROJECT2501. We've changed our benchmarking suite and removed the poor scaling Crysis and long-in-the-tooth Lost Planet: Extreme Condition and replaced them with Race Driver: GRID and Call of Duty 4 - a move that better reflects gaming today.

The AMD cards do better in the new games, and the 2GB framebuffer of the X2 helps keep things chugging along nicely as the resolution is increased. We don't reckon it'll be much faster than two 1GB-equipped HD 4870s, but this is a single-card-to-single-card comparison with multi-GPU evaluation to follow.

Bottom line: the sheer compute power of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 makes it the fastest single-board card around.

[Tarinder]

Is it about time that you did another poll (i know i could do one, but you'd get more response...)?
I remember one here a couple of years ago, but things have changed alot, widescreen monitors may be up to 50% of Hexus readers now....

Good idea. I'd be very interested to see how many readers use a 2,560x1,600px panel as their main display. I'd eat my hat, if I had one, if it's over 5 per cent. Only one way to find out...

[Tarinder]

i wants me one!!

Still have a 3870X2 sitting round and my 4870..

Need to stop wasting money!!

EDIT: Also.. Any idea on what that other link will being in terms of performance? EG: another 10 - 20%?

The GPU-to-GPU link, SidePort CrossFireX, is an unknown right now. It all depends upon application, of course, and we reckon AMD will eke out a few per cent extra when it's realised in future driver updates.

[kalniel]

EDIT: Also.. Any idea on what that other link will being in terms of performance? EG: another 10 - 20%?

I'd say none. The scaling at extreme resolution and IQ suggests that there isn't really a bottleneck there with this card, unlike other cards. Should there ever be a game/card that reached the PCI-E 2.0 bandwidth limit then maybe it'd make a difference, but that doesn't exist yet.

Does anyone know if I'll see similar performance if I Xfire another 4870 in on an X38 Mobo or does the X2 contain some sort of secret magic which makes it better than the sum of its parts?

No magic this time around. The main difference at uber resolution is the 1gb framebuffer, so you can expect to see 2x4870 1gb cards perform very closely to this card IMHO. At merely high resolutions then 2x4870 512mb card will perform similarly unless a game has odd memory requirements (like crysis).

[Biscuit]

To HEXUS - You guys know that in the console or .cfg for cod 4 you need to take off the FPS limit to get over 85. I dont know why it says 85 when the limit according to the cfg is 91 but hey...

The command is 'com_maxfps 250' which would set the max to 250

If it didnt require a power station to run i would definitely consider this card.

[stevie lee]

... but this is a single-card-to-single-card comparison with multi-GPU evaluation to follow....

<snipped out the irrelevant bits>

when you do the dual 4870X2 testing, can you try it on a 32 bit windows with 4gb ram, just to see how much ram windows can see when the 4gb limit is taken up purely by graphics ram. its something that may be relevant to people who don't want to get 64bit windows for whatever reason - driver incompatibilities, cant afford it.. stuff like that.




as for this card - DAMN - who wants to buy a healthy kidney? lung going cheap too! PM me for details..


and correct me if i'm wrong:

22" monitors and below - 4850 or 9800 gtx
24" monitors - 4870 or gtx260
30" monitors - 4870x2 or gtx280

[Tarinder]

To HEXUS - You guys know that in the console or .cfg for cod 4 you need to take off the FPS limit to get over 85. I dont know why it says 85 when the limit according to the cfg is 91 but hey...

The command is 'com_maxfps 250' which would set the max to 250

If it didnt require a power station to run i would definitely consider this card.

Just looking into this now, as we've never seen a card average this high before.

Thanks.

[Tarinder]

<snipped out the irrelevant bits>

when you do the dual 4870X2 testing, can you try it on a 32 bit windows with 4gb ram, just to see how much ram windows can see when the 4gb limit is taken up purely by graphics ram. its something that may be relevant to people who don't want to get 64bit windows for whatever reason - driver incompatibilities, cant afford it.. stuff like that.




as for this card - DAMN - who wants to buy a healthy kidney? lung going cheap too! PM me for details..


and correct me if i'm wrong:


22" monitors and below - 4850 or 9800 gtx
24" monitors - 4870 or gtx260
30" monitors - 4870x2 or gtx280

The first point is an interesting one and we'll put it on a Vista XP 32-bit install to find out.

I agree with the monitor sizes and scaling, although would recommend the 4870 X2 over the GTX 280, assuming stock is to be found at £330-ish.

[dangel]

The first point is an interesting one and we'll put it on a Vista XP 32-bit install to find out.

It'll probably barf if it requires 4gb of addressing for graphics alone - you've got the other devices in the list on top of that which exceeds 4gb in total.

You'll probably get -512mb of RAM free

[koocha]

I've only got a 22" monitor. Well, there's a 32" telly here too (1920x1080) but it's at a funny angle so I don't use it for computer stuff really.

I've got a nvidia 8800gts at the mo and might be looking to upgrade. the 4870x2 is complete overkill. I'm going to wait and see how the 4850x2 does at the "lower" resolutions (I remember when that was 800x600)

[miniyazz]

<snipped out the irrelevant bits>

when you do the dual 4870X2 testing, can you try it on a 32 bit windows with 4gb ram, just to see how much ram windows can see when the 4gb limit is taken up purely by graphics ram. its something that may be relevant to people who don't want to get 64bit windows for whatever reason - driver incompatibilities, cant afford it.. stuff like that.

Driver incompatibilities, sure, but with Vista it's a free upgrade to 64-bit if you own the 32-bit edition - don't use price as an excuse to stop you from enjoying more RAM!

[koocha]

Driver incompatibilities, sure, but with Vista it's a free upgrade to 64-bit if you own the 32-bit edition - don't use price as an excuse to stop you from enjoying more RAM!

I haven't had problems with any drivers for my stuff. Sure, when Vista first came out, but not anymore. I think it's a non-issue now.