Product Listing

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB GDDR5 - Two Heads are Better than One

By Kenny Yeo - 12 Aug 2008

Test Setup

Test Setup

We'll be testing the 4870 X2 on both Windows Vista and XP, and we'll be using our usual setups which are as follows:

Windows XP SP2 Test System

  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz)
  • Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' motherboard
  • 2 x 1GB DDR2-800 Kingston HyperX memory in dual channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.7 80GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c


Windows Vista SP1 Test System

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.00GHz)
  • Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 motherboard
  • 2 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Aeneon memory in dual channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

Since the new HD 4870 X2 is ATI's current flagship, we'll be looking closely at how it fares against NVIDIA's GTX 280. Also, since its basically two standard 4870 heaped onto a single PCB, we're also interested to see how stacks up against a pair of HD 4870 512MBs in CrossFire setup - take careful note that this setup has half the frame buffer size of the X2 version. And for comparison's sake, we've also decided to include the Radeon HD 4850, GeForce GTX 260, and the old Radeon HD 3870 X2. Here's the list of cards and the tested driver versions used for both the Window XP and Vista setups:

  • ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB (Catalyst 8.52 - provided by ATI)
  • ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB (Catalyst 8.6, Series-5)
  • ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB (CrossFireX) (Catalyst 8.6, Series-5)
  • ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB (Catalyst 8.6)
  • ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB (CrossFireX) (Catalyst 8.6)
  • ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB (Catalyst 8.5)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB (ForceWare 177.34)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 896MB (ForceWare 177.34)

And the following benchmarks were tested using their built-in time demo or benchmarking tools:

For Windows XP

  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
  • Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
  • F.E.A.R (ver 1.0)
  • Crysis (ver 1.1)
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)


For Windows Vista

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage (ver 101)
  • Crysis (ver 1.21)
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