Reviews - Pro-Clockers! PC Reviews One MegaHertz At A Time

Introduction

ATI’S Flagship landed well over a month ago. Before then, gamers had nothing but hype and rumors of 2GB of GDDR5, Dual GPUs and Shader 4.1 to keep them warm. With the arrival of the 4870x2, those rumors are now reality and the hype has proven to be fact.

The introduction of the original 4870 brought ATI back into the mainstream. Its price to performance ratio was far better than that of the nVidia GTX280, but with recent nVidia price drops, that gap is narrowing. Many of us rushed out to scoop up the 4870, because of the price/performance sweet spot it had attained and were rewarded with the ability to play our favorite games at higher resolutions.

People across the globe purchasing and building systems based on the higher-end Intel chipset to utilize dual GPU setups now have a reason to justify their purchases. For quite some time, people that were dreaming of a better-than-average gaming rig were forced to go with SLI simply because of the pure graphics power the nVidia 8xxx and 9xxx graphic cards offered over ATI cards. Things have changed.

We’ll be looking at our first dual GPU card at Pro-Clockers courtesy of Sapphire. The Sapphire 4870x2 is based on the ATI reference design and its numbers reflect this. Let’s take it for a test drive.

Sapphire take on the 4870x2

Believe it or not - the best just got better. For the first time ever, 2.4 teraFLOPS of graphics horse power, 1600 stream processors and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory have been combined to create the fastest and most powerful graphics card available today.