AMD recently introduced the HD 4870 and it certainly made their competition revise their pricing immediately. While it’s AMD’s top-of-the-line GPU, lately AMD has been focusing more on lesser priced products that deliver excellent value for performance. But they obviously wish to compete in the fastest graphics card category and for that, they’ve been using dual GPU based cards.

ASUS sent us AMD’s new big gun, the HD 4870 X2 with an incredible 2GB of DDR5 frame buffer split between the two GPUs- certainly the highest amount of memory we’ve seen in a single card. Obviously, performance improvement will be better at ultra-high resolutions than your run-of-the-mill 1280x1024 resolution.

Key Features

• 2 GB of GDDR5 memory
• 2.4 teraFLOPS of GPU power
• DirectX® 10.1
• 1600 stream processing units
• 2 x 256-bit memory interface
• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
• Dual mode ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
• PCI Express® 2.0 support
• Dynamic geometry acceleration
• Game physics processing capability
• ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology1
• Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray™ and HD Video 
• Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) 
• DVD Upscaling  
• Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
  

Specifications

• Fabricated processor: 55nm
• Core clock: 750MHz
• Memory Type: 16x GDDR5
• Memory Clock: 900MHz
  

 Some mighty impressive specs with 1600 stream processors and 2GB frame buffer up there.

 Packaging

As usual, Asus likes to pack the contents in an over-sized box and we see the return of the hunter lady picture on the front. Inside, you have the drivers CD with a user manual, one Molex to 6PIN PCI-e power cable, another  6pin to 8pin PCI-e power cable, DVI and HDMI adapters, Crossfire connector and finally a VIVO cable.