ASUS EAH4870X2 TOP video card review

Having reviewed several parts based around AMD's RV770 in recent months, we've become well-versed in what the company's latest architecture has to offer - An excellent feature set coupled with fantastic frame rates at relatively high resolutions, with anti-aliasing performance in particular leaps and bounds over what we've seen in the past couple of generations from AMD, to the extent that using 8x multi-sampling in numerous titles is now a reality.

However, there was one hole left by the initial RV770 launch, and that was any form of competition at the ultra high-end segment, leaving NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 sitting pretty with the performance crown.  Of course, this was nothing more than another part of AMD's plan with this architecture, which involved targeting the mainstay of the market first before scaling the solution to the high and low ends.  As we first saw with the Radeon HD 3800 architecture, scaling upwards to the high-end involved teaming two GPUs together in a CrossFire configuration, and it is that plan that we've seen repeated with the Radeon HD 4800 series, with the high-end now occupied by R700, aka the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which quite simply sticks two RV770 GPUs in CrossFire onto a single physical board.

As if that wasn't enough processing power for even the most demanding of users, ASUS have taken this design to further limits in typical fashion via their TOP range of boards, cranking up both core and memory clock speeds on both GPUs.  What can a factory overclocked Radeon HD 4870 X2 bring to the table?  That's exactly what we're here to find out, so let's start putting the EAH4870X2 TOP through its paces.