Conclusions

Having examined several other Radeon HD 4870 X2 boards in the past, there isn't too much more we can say here without repeating ourselves.  While AMD's flagship may no longer be the king of the hill in performance terms thanks to the release of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295, it's still fast enough to provide playable performance at 2560x1600 with anti-aliasing enabled in the majority of titles, which should remain enough to satisfy the 30" LCD owners out there (or indeed anyone looking to game at lower resolutions with even higher levels of eye candy enabled, thanks to the wealth of Custom Filter anti-aliasing modes available to this board).  In pure gaming performance terms, it's difficult to ask any more of a graphics board.

Probably the best news to come out of our testing here are the improvements that came from the move to AMD's latest Catalyst 9.1 driver over their previous Catalyst 8.12 driver set - In virtually all the CPU-limited situations we came upon, using this new driver gave us some pretty impressive increases in performance, which is always good to see.  While most of these scenarios and titles were already playable with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 using older drivers, you can never say no to more performance when it comes from a simple download and install.

While it may be surprising, and almost disappointing, to see XFX sticking tightly to AMD's reference specifications for this particular release, given how much raw power the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has at its disposal it's actually quite difficult to argue the need for factory overclocking.  A custom cooling solution would have been good to see, as GPU temperatures under load do shoot up very high at times and I think it's fair to say this isn't the most efficient cooler we've ever seen, but then again the Radeon HD 4850 XXX we looked at last week from XFX was the exception rather than the rule from this AIB partner when it comes to the use of a non-reference cooler.

The good news that comes from this particular board is that it threatens to be very price competitive - XFX's take on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is in there amongst the cheapest that we've seen on the market here in the UK, and if you shop around there are some excellent deals to be have (with Overclockers UK and Scan in particular selling this card for a knock-down price at the time of writing).  Add to that XFX's apparent support commitments, and you have yourself a pretty well-rounded product for the enthusiast sector, based around an SKU that fears no-one when it comes to gaming performance.

Product information

XFX Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB

- Vendor web site
- Vendor product information

Recommended retail pricing (at time of going to press):

Dabs - £385.25 including VAT
Overclockers UK - £333.49 including VAT
Scan - £333.49 including VAT

Many thanks to XFX for providing the sample for this review

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