We recently looked at the HD4870 X2 and were easily convinced that it is currently the fastest single card solution in the market. So we did what any righteous hardware editor would do- put two of them together. Now, if you remember, the X2 by itself shows its true powers at very high resolutions with all details turned on. So you would need a REALLY high-end display to put all four GPUs at maximum work which is something we, unfortunately, don't have.

Also keep in mind that we've ALWAYS had issues with some game or another when testing two newly released graphics card- whether they be in SLI or Crossfire. Constant driver updates are needed to tweak and extract performance, especially out of newly released games. Thus, we were ready to see issues with the X2 Crossfire setup and we certainly ran into them.

Anyways, enough with the talk- we already had an ASUS card sitting with us, courtesy of ASUS and AMD sent along another HD4870 X2 card which was coincidentally identical to the one we had sitting with us- again an ASUS. As we've a;ready looked at the HD4870 X2, we wont go into details about the card but head straight to the benchmarks. The following is the testbed that was used.

Testbed

CPU:	Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz
Memory:	2 x 1GB OCZ DDR3-1600MHz Memory Modules
Motherboard:	Intel X48 Chipset
Optical/Hard Drives:	Generic 8X DVDRW, Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB Cache SATA
Monitor:	BENQ 24" LCD with 1920x1200 Resolution
Operating System:	Windows Vista Ultimate - 32bit
PSU:	1000W Silverstone PSU

For comparison, we've taken most of the high-end single card solutions as well as some SLI/Crossfire setups. These include the GTX 260 and the GTX 280 is SLI mode, the 9800GTX in Triple SLI mode, the HD 4870 X2 from AMD and finally the dual GPU powered 9800GX2 in SLI mode.

Benchmarks

If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com