Overclocked Radeon HD 4870 X2 Shoot-Out: ASUS, MSI
NVIDIA’s and AMD’s graphics board partners usually take differing approaches when releasing factory overclocked variants of each company’s respective high-end GPUs. When NVIDIA launches a new part for example, their board partners typically have factory overclocked versions at the ready, and at launch, it’s sometimes easier to find overclocked cards than stock reference models. AMD’s board partners, however, don’t usually take the same approach. When AMD launches a new ATI Radeon, the first batch of cards to hit typically follow the reference design to the letter, and custom, factory overclocked models don’t arrive until some time later.
That’s what happened with the Radeon HD 4870 X2. At launch, just about every Radeon HD 4870 X2 available at retail had the exact same features and specifications. But more recently, a few board partners have introduced factory overclocked variants that take the performance of what is already the fastest graphics card available up a notch. We’ve actually got two of them in house, the Asus EAH4870X2 TOP and the MSI R4870X2-T2D2G-OC, and plan to show you just how much extra performance each has to offer over standard reference cards.
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
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Texture filtering features
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The specifications above list the main features and benefits of the RV770 GPU that is the foundation of the Radeon HD 4800 series. Keep in mind, however, that there are two RV770 GPUs on Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, each coupled to 1GB of GDDR5 RAM, for a grand total of 2GB of frame buffer memory. We've gone into detail on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in the past, so we won't cover the architecture again here, but if you'd like more information about the technologies employed on the Radeon HD 4870 X2, here are a few links to some of our previous coverage:
In our Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 launch article, we write at length about the RV770 GPU and in the 4870 X2 piece we explain how the dual GPUs are implemented on the card. Those two articles explain many of the more technical details we won't be going into again here.
