XFX Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB video card review

After casting an eye over XFX's Radeon HD 4850 XXX last week, this week it's the turn of their take on AMD's flagship graphics board, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 - It may no longer be the king of the hill since the launch of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295, but it still packs more than enough graphics processing punch for all but the most demanding of users.

Unlike many of XFX's other offerings, this particular board uses both AMD's reference clock speeds and cooling solution, and as we've seen similarly specified boards from other vendors in the past this allows us to investigate a couple of additional angles for this review.  Firstly, we'll be taking a look at how performance has changed between AMD's last graphics driver of 2008, Catalyst 8.12, and their first offering for this year, Catalyst 9.1 - In theory there have been some decent changes made to improve performance on multi-GPU configurations in particular, so it should be interesting to see how these latest drivers fare.

As well as looking into driver performance, we'll also be taking this opportunity to briefly discuss XFX's warranty and support offerings, a side of their products that we rarely mention but one that XFX themselves seem very proud of.

So, with that said and done, let's take a look at the subject of today's review!