AMD Strikes Back with their HD 4870 X2

For those of you who either stick to our news RSS or skip down the front page too fast, be sure not to skip over our look at AMD’s latest GPU offering. It not only becomes the fastest graphics card the world has ever seen, but it even greatly surpasses the previous champion, NVIDIA’s GTX 280, by a rather healthy margin in every-single game we tested.

The worst performance gain we saw was with our lone time demo, for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which was still a healthy 27% boost over the GTX 280. The DX 10-heavy Call of Juarez saw an even more healthy gain, of 77.8%. No need to wipe your eyes, I really said 77.8%.

The downsides are in the price, but given the performance boost over the GTX 280, it’s actually justified. It’s not often I’d ever say a $549 GPU could be justified, either, but this one can be. The card also happens to be a massive power-sucker, but that’s not much of a surprise given that two literal GPU cores are slammed onto the same PCB.

So if you are on the lookout for a new graphics card, or just want to make sure your drool mechanisms are all in check, read on.

Pricing-wise, the HD 4870 X2 costs $100 more than the GTX 280, and as I mentioned in the intro, that increase is actually justified, especially if you run ultra-high resolutions. That’s not to say that $550, or even $450 isn’t a lot of cash, but comparatively speaking, it’s actually well-priced. The current price for a single-GPU HD 4870 is around $270, so that makes the X2 cheaper than going the Crossfire route.

Source: Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB – AMD Reclaims GPU Supremacy