ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 previews show up
Monday 14th July 2008, 09:04:00 PM, written by Rys
Lucky media outlets web-wide have had some time to spend with R700 in Radeon HD 4870 X2 form recently. While full analysis of the hardware is yet to break cover, the first looks from ATI's favoured media partners shows that it's pretty much what you'd expect from single-board Crossfire with RV770 at 750MHz, with 1GiB of GDDR5 for each GPU to use.
High-resolution testing at Tech Report shows that the configuration of RV770s on a single board, talking sometimes via a PLX PCI Express 2.0 switch and sometimes via a mysterious "Crossfire sideport", scales as well or better than two discrete HD 4870s do on a supporting mainboard.
Some of that is undoubtedly down to the memory available to each GPU, though, which makes the question of what the sideport is actually used for a deeper one. Some well designed tests should be able to weed out what communication happens via that channel, though, if anything.
It's undoubtedly the fastest single graphics board ever produced, as long as your application or game supports it that is. Raw headline figures of 2.4Tflops of FP32 compute show that there's some serious rendering muscle available should software be able to exploit the two GPUs and their available rendering modes.
Heat output and power consumption are both reasonable for the configuration, and the dual-slot cooler gets praise from some quarters for the job it does keeping everything cool. It's a big ol' board though, and heavier than is probably safe to ship around attached to a system without something other than the PCI backplane to attach it to.
In short, AMD has the single-board graphics crown back with consumate ease, and while the execution is a little blunt, it'll stand toe-to-toe with GeForce GTX 280 on price, which is definitely in the X2's favour.
Check out Tech Report for more coverage, if their servers are able to take the Slashdot!
High-resolution testing at Tech Report shows that the configuration of RV770s on a single board, talking sometimes via a PLX PCI Express 2.0 switch and sometimes via a mysterious "Crossfire sideport", scales as well or better than two discrete HD 4870s do on a supporting mainboard.
Some of that is undoubtedly down to the memory available to each GPU, though, which makes the question of what the sideport is actually used for a deeper one. Some well designed tests should be able to weed out what communication happens via that channel, though, if anything.
It's undoubtedly the fastest single graphics board ever produced, as long as your application or game supports it that is. Raw headline figures of 2.4Tflops of FP32 compute show that there's some serious rendering muscle available should software be able to exploit the two GPUs and their available rendering modes.
Heat output and power consumption are both reasonable for the configuration, and the dual-slot cooler gets praise from some quarters for the job it does keeping everything cool. It's a big ol' board though, and heavier than is probably safe to ship around attached to a system without something other than the PCI backplane to attach it to.
In short, AMD has the single-board graphics crown back with consumate ease, and while the execution is a little blunt, it'll stand toe-to-toe with GeForce GTX 280 on price, which is definitely in the X2's favour.
Check out Tech Report for more coverage, if their servers are able to take the Slashdot!
Tagging
ati ± radeon, x2, rv770, crossfire, hd, 4870, afr
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