Happy Radeon HD 4870 X2 preview day!

Read the article at the [H] and I must say I'm impressed. Although the GTX280 SLI kept up in a lot of places, the R700 is a very, very formidable opponent. The AA rendering on this card is WAY better than the R600. Not only is this good for ATi, but good for the consumer as well. Let the prices continue to drop!

a little disapointed, owell, but hey 280gtx are for 450 now, but not going to buy one, im waiting for the 4870 to get cheaper

That card is loooooooooong!

It has to be long to contain all that world-destroying power within it.

And the black PCB is a nice touch too. I hope they go with that.

@Mach5
The card is the same length as the GTX 280. This pic makes it look really long.

Hey Evil, Yeah the GTX 280 is loooong too and both are reserved for specific case applications. Doubt most can afford to accomodate such cards.

Niche cards.

With the addition of Adaptive AA and this card, ATI will be the leader and nVidia will be playing catch up. Not saying that the GTX 280 is bad (it eats children), it's just that ATI has now innovated something totally new. Unless nVidia can get GPU-PhyX implemented quickly, ATI will win this round.

I must admit this card does look pretty hot all black like this. Plus it also performs pretty good(referring to review @[H]).

@Mach5Motorsport- Most full tower cases will definately be able to support both of lengths of these cards. I can't say the same about mid tower cases though.

@Sunny
I know zero uber gamers that still use full tower cases. Sure, those people are out there. But come on! Who really needs a full tower case in this day and age?!?

Wasn't it ideal to minimize the case footprint and reduce the space?

(oh, to use a bleeding edge vid card I guess) ;)

It is kinda cool to have a smaller pc for the smaller footprint but then you miss out on having too much good stuff like tons of hard drives and multiple huge video cards. With small towers comes compromise.

HD prices have fallen and capacities have increased. 500GB internal HD for under $100. You don't need tons of hard drives any more unless you need to store those multiple terrbytes of videos and MP3s that you never ever have time to watch/listen. smaller tower = compromise? LOL yeah...more like a big tower trying to overcompensate for other shortcommings! LOL

Dude, this is like the first card in a long time thats taken my breath away, its impressive, and seems like this could start WWIII when combined with Intels new 10000 series CPU's comeing out.

Very interesting. I like the idea of ATI's method of Anti Aliasing and believe it has a lot of potential especially with the amount of stream processors ATI pack on their cards these days. However, I'm a Nvidia fan myself (mainly because their cards are excellent and that I have never been satisfied with the ATI products I have owned(including X1950Pro)) and think that Nvidia will make probably a 55nm die shrink of the GT200 core and slap together a dual GPU card. Anyway time will tell. I'm happy ATI is still competing and would consider purchasing one of their products if it could beat Nvidia's flagship cards fair and square (for a decent price, of course). Also ATI makes Nvidia drops their stingy prices. :)

Oh that was just cruel.

Its all good I guess if you have a small tower cause you got small money. I don't have that problem though.

guess you won't be crying over the lack of an Nvidia/evga gtx rebate anytime soon,eh? After all, you've got big money so its all good.

True I am all good on this side. I just got my cards yesterday.

just a side note, this card has 2 gb of ram

i wonder how the 4870 single would work with 1 gb of ram over 512 mb (same question for the 4850)

Can't wait until those Nehalems are released...
seems some games are still CPU limited .

@Naito - What would you call beating nVidia fair and square ? Simply adding a shit ton of stuff onto a single GPU and selling it without a real profit ( or at a uber high price ) and making a half-assed midend card ? In my books ATi beat nVidia fair and square .

@Radiator - I can see where your coming from, and your right, I suppose, but I don't know why, I just like Nvidia's products more. My first 'proper' (well what I consider proper) GPU was a GeForce 4 MX4000. And I know its only a GeForce 2 on steroids, but it still allowed me to play CNC Generals: Zero Hour. So I guess that's why I like Nvidia, stupid reason or not, Oh, and because my 8800GTS 512MB is awesome. Handles all games I have tried really well on 1920X1200, with max settings, but not including Crysis because I do not own it (I'm more of a console guy). Anyway enough blabbing on about stuff. Here's some interesting , but unconfirmed specs.

NVIDIA GTX 350
Core: GT300
Process: 55nm
Die size: 576mm
Memory Bus: 512bit
Memory Type/Framebuffer: GDDR5/2GB
Shader Processors: 480
Texture Units: 64
Memory Bandwidth: 216GB/sec
Core Clocks (Core/Shader/Mem) 830/2075/3360MHZ
Pixel Fill Rate: 36.3Gpixels/s
Texture Fill Rate: 84.4Gpixels/s
Source: http://en.hardspell.com/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=3764

And what does the rival have up it's sleeve? (Unconfirmed)

RV870
Core: RV870
Process: 45nm (or 40nm)?
Die size: 140mm2
Memory Bus: 256bit
Shader Processors: 960?
Other info: Native Dual-Core for X2?
Source: http://en.hardspell.com/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=3768

P.S. I'm also excited about the Nehalem microarchitecture - native quad/oct cores, hyperthreading, new instruction sets and many more. Can't wait. :D