Overclocked Radeon HD 4870 X2 Shoot-Out: ASUS, MSI

The Asus EAH4870X2 TOP and MSI R4870X2-T2D2G-OC both look similar to ATI's reference Radeon HD 4870 X2 card, with a few minor aesthetic and technical differences...

    

    
Asus EAH4870X2 TOP

The Asus EAH4870X2 TOP has the same PCB and cooler design as other 4870 X2 cards, but Asus puts their own spin on the cooler with a decal featuring a Asian warrior chick surrounded by some cherry blossoms.  Like other 4870 X2s, the EAH4870X2 TOP features a pair of RV770 GPUs and 2GB of GDDR5 memory (1GB per GPU),but Asus has jacked up the frequencies of both. The EAH4870X2 TOP's GPUs are clocked at 790MHz and its memory comes in at 915MHz, up from 750MHz and 900MHz on stock Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards.  The increases in GPU and memory clocks will give the EAH4870X2 TOP a boost in compute and fillrate performance, and also up peak memory bandwidth.

To compliment the card, Asus includes a handful of accessories with the EAH4870X2 TOP.  Bundled with the card are driver and utility CDs, a leather CD case, a quick setup guide, a CrossFire bridge connector, 6- and 8-pin PCI Express power adapters, an HD component output dongle, and DVI to VGA, DVI to HDMI, and S-Video to composite output adapters.

    

    
MSI R4870X2-T2D2G-OC

MSI's R4870X2-T2D2G-OC also uses the same PCB and coolre as ATI's reference Radeon HD 4870 X2. And like Asus, MSI differentiates their card with a custom decal on the fan shroud and increase clocks.  As we've mentioned, reference Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards have their GPUs clocked at 750MHz and their memory clocked at 900MHz (3600MHz effective), MSI's card however. clocks in with 780MHz GPUs--its memory clock mimics the reference design at 900MHz.

Bundled with the R4870X2-T2D2G-OC are a driver CD, a quick setup guide, a user's manual, a CrossFire bridge connector, an HD component output dongle, and DVI to VGA, DVI to HDMI, and S-Video to composite output adapters.  Unfortunately, no power adapters were to be found.