ATI 4870 X2 (R700) GFX Review @ DriverHeaven

Liqourice

Found a Club-3D one here in Sweden for roughly £329 in stock.

That's a first to see something cheeper here than in UK! Otherwise the prices here seems to be around £360-370, not that anyone has them in stock. :P

I so want one. I wish I would have waited a few months and stayed with the X850 until this beast was released instead of getting the 3870X2. Even though my CPU is bottlenecking the card I have now...

sammorris

Yeah, the 3870 series was a bit of a bum deal compared to these really. Especially since I managed to kill one of my 3870s, the one with no manu. warranty...

kris23

it looks like yoyotech has 4 more in stock....

shall i go hunting for UK stores that have them in stock? lol

sammorris

Sure, why not? You can be our little pricegrabber... :P

Erroneus

F*UCK YEAH! Now we are talking!

Great review DH and great to se ATI kicking ass again.

sammorris

AN X48-DS4 board and a geforce card erroneus? You know what must be done... haha

Erroneus

I have been thinking about two 4850 for a long time, they are pretty cheap and performs well, but frankly the lack of really good PC games at the moment keeps me from updating

Zardon

Hey it could be worse you could have a system like this which is needed to keep cool one of our (always modded) skulltrail systems. Which comprises 8 watercooled cores at 4.2ghz, 16gb of fully buffered DDR2, 2 x 4870 X2's, and 5 hard drives (you cant actually see a 120mm fan on the ram and another on the northbridge then 120mm top, 120mm rear and 200mm front!)

mike2h

lmao. thx, z.
hard to keep a comp 'neat' if u r always messin with it. especially custom cooled setups. while mine is very neat i dread having to work/adjust it because of the work involved cutting ties/untucking/moving/etc. then redoing it.

Zardon

For those of you 3dmarker's here are some results in 3dmark06 on the pure GFX file rate and multitexturing and vertex shading.

(two X2s in Crossfire X). Certainly shows the potential...........

sammorris

LOL - I love the hacked in 200mm Tricool...
Zardon: 4870 is up and running in my rig, sucks on rude body parts in 3dmark06, but kicks ass in everything else - it's rendered Age of Conan and Supreme Commander:Forged Alliance far more playable.
3dmark score is 12759 versus 10841 for my HD3870. When I OC'ed the 3870 I got 11492, not tried OCing the 4870 yet, but I know my dual core will hold me back. Interesting, I thought powerplay was disabled on the engineering samples, but seemingly it must just have been early drivers as it's working for me - only the core though. Memory remains at 3.6Ghz throughout, but core drops from 750 to 550 when not under load.

Are those NZXT Blue LED fans?

Zardon

I wouldnt really worry about 3dmarks to be honest. aspects of them are so cpu limiting you cant get a clear reading of the GFX power. I love those multi texturing and vertex results however as they give a very true indication of what they can deal with.

Its all about the gaming, isnt it really at the end of the day? If you think about it, thats why we get the hardware .... to play cool games. I never really understand the attraction of sitting in a room with LN2, and trying to get a certain score in some synethic application. Just my view though.

Yes, those are nzxt fans, they werent choosen for any particular reason apart from the fact that we tend to put parts we get given by companies into systems. the 220mm fan is a wonderful aspect of these systems, you wouldnt believe how much it helps blowing air over the pcbs and motherboard when you reach high temperatures. also very little noise too which is another plus point.

Personally ive been playing a little with X2's in CF X and as we said in the review not everything scales very well. my two favourite work great though, Call Of Duty 4 and HL2:Ep2. great to play and the cards work well in doubling the FPS (which means you can double the AA and still get great performance).

sammorris

Sad that I recognised case fans with no label on them isn't it? Hehe, comes from owning them and moving them - fitted them to an Antec 900 at one stage.

I don't worry about 3dmarks, the score of the card in real world gaming has pushed that to the back of my mind even if I did care, being able to max Crysis and achieve pretty solid frame rates at my resolution has astounded me, as has the sky high frame rates in FEAR. Have yet to try COD4 and GRiD - curious to see if I will get the frame rate crashes you're mean to experience with AA enabled at 2560x1600.

Zardon

2560x1600 with one 4870 and AA might be pushing it. Think of the fun you will have later however adding another in Crossfire Call Of Duty 4 scales brilliantly. (what a game too!).

OldBuzzard

Shucks Z...you need to get one of these puppys, and watercool EVERYTHING

ERM-3K4U5 (4U), 5 Pumps - Water cooling systems, pc liquid cooling kit, cpu, video card, hard drive

With 3000W worth of cooling and 5 seperate loops, it should be able to cool the CPUs, GPU's, Chipset, RAM, and HDDs

sammorris

So far the only games it causes issue with are Crysis, GRiD and Age of Conan. Haven't tried COD4 yet but based on the results it looks like it should be ok. It actually ran alright with my two 3870s.

Zardon

This certainly gives the 4870 X2s a good run for their money....... (3x XFX GTX XXX 280's).

kris23

so can skulltrail run 3x GTX 280s in SLi yet Z or is it still bad?

Zardon

Works now, with the new bios from Intel and the new driver from Nvidia. works very well too. 1920x1200 at all very high im getting around 90fps avg in crysis.

kris23

HOLY Shhh...... . . . .

dang thats alot of GPU power....

are we gonna get an article on 3 way SLi now?

kris23

also does crossfire X with 4 individual cards work well in skulltrail?

Zardon

Yes, its in the pipeline dont have a date though.

kris23