The video card market has been interesting in that the last couple months have seen NVIDIA and ATI trade jabs with each adjusting their pricing strategy to meet market demands. Competition is a good thing in the video card industry as we have seen stagnant releases by both NVIDIA and ATI over the last two or three years with neither side really increasing performance by the magnitude that the GeForce 7 to 8 transition saw or the Radeon 8500 to 9700 Pro transition saw.
ATI launched their HD 4870 to great praise in June of 2008, 6 short months ago. This was their first real win in the videocard arena since the ATI Radeon x1800 was introduced. The HD 4870 is one of the price/performance leaders in the video card industry for the Holiday season. ATI decided to take the efficient route, designing a new architecture on 964 million transistors on 55 nanometer process technology giving more performance per watt than their competitor, the GTX 260. This efficiency also translated into the ability to make a dual-GPU card with two of the chips without using too much power.
Enter the HD 4870 X2 dual-GPU video card into the arena. ATI combined two of their HD 4870 chips onto a single PCB, with 2GB of GDDR5 memory split into two 256-bit buses. This card has shown the performance to outdo the GeForce GTX 280 throughout the performance spectrum. The HD 4870 X2 is also capable of being used in a dual HD 4870 X2 configuration called Quad CrossfireX. Palit decided to release their reference clocked HD 4870 X2 at launch but today have also launched a custom designed PCB HD 4870 X2 called the Revolution 700 Deluxe Radeon HD 4870 X2 card which is on the review bench today.
