Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe Radeon HD 4870 X2 Review :: Palit Revolution 700 Radeon HD 4870 X2 Card

Cooling system

Comparison

Side view of two cards

3 slots

Palit decided to make a number of significant changes to the default cooling system on the HD 4870 X2 card and designed the PCB to successfully overclock the HD 4870 X2 without issue. One of the first things you'll notice upon taking the card out of the box is it is very wide. It in fact requires installation on a system with not one, not two but THREE slots. The installation of a HD 4870 X2 card normally takes two slots but this card has an interesting cooling solution.

PWM fan

Rear view

Warning sticker

Crossfire connector

The Palit card has two PWM fans that cool the graphics chip and push air out the four copper heatpipes on the card. Palit has gone down the dual fan route before with their Dual Sonic cooling solution on some of their cards, but this is the first time I've seen this solution on a HD 4870 X2 card. The interesting thing about this card is that the PWM fan speed can be adjusted according to temperature allowing the Revolution 700 to run quietly in my case.

Power connectors

8-pin power

6-pin power

Top view

A Crossfire bridge chip is on the top of the card allowing the user to run two HD 4870 X2 cards in Crossfire mode. CrossfireX with two HD 4870 X2s means that there are four HD 4870 chips running together to run a 3D program. Performance of four HD 4870 chips is likely to exceed three GTX 280 cards running in SLI performance on most applications that won't be CPU limited. Of course the question becomes what applications need that much power?

IO

Rear view

PCI Express

Head on view

The Palit Revolution has an interesting IO area. While most cards have two DVI and a TV-out on the market, Palit decided to include four different display outputs: DisplayPort, HDMI, Dual-link DVD, and D-Sub making it very flexible in terms of what kind of monitors can attach. You can attach a DP+HDMI, two HDMI, HDMI+DVI or any combination with adapters that are available for purchase. Note the card can only do dual-monitor at any given time but the choice is great.