Very disappointing Crysis benchmarks. 2 GPUs, 1600 Stream processors and 2GB of the fastest video memory available, yet it cannot deliver decent frame rates at high resolution with the highest settings. I don't think that this game is coded "badly", it is just ahead of its time. We will have to wait for Radeon 5800 or even 6800 to play this game properly.

Like I said before, these graphic cards can't play over 60 fps on Crysis at high resolution are still suck. They're not worth the money. Too much power comsumption.

"We'd really like to see AMD work more closely with game developers to implement profiles before new games are released"

Or develop a method that doesn't rely on game profiles all together to enable teaming.

Wow. This thing looks sweet. I think I've found my next GPU.

I ran this game on my 8800gtx perfectly fine @ 1680x1050 everything on high, plus the extra goodies from dx10 ran in dx9, and averaged 27-33 fps the whole game (except certain spots). It was very playable, and gorgeous.

I understand the lashing out about the performance scaling, but the game was and is playable on good hardware from the last 1.5 years or so.

"That's, erm, considerable—beyond the obvious graphics applications, that's the sort of computing power that may one day enable men to figure out what women want."

^_^ i might have to spring for one now.

"you're usually stuck running on just a single GPU"

I wouldn't say usually, and I definitely don't think single-GPU is the way of the future. Bad implementation doesn't imply that the concept was bad. multi-GPU is potentially cheaper (throwing away a single chip is less costly), and driver implementations could potentially bring it up to speed, considering the complete data separation graphics programming languages force at some level (e.g. blocks in nvidia cuda).

Check out that power consumption! How positions have changed for NV and ATI, huh? Performance is great sometimes, but yowsers. This thing can certainly replace a room heater in the home and I believe that could be a beneficial marketing bullet! They should have launched in November for optimum market reception methinks tho. :)

Personally, I'm never ever going to trust a corp to support a uber low volume product like this that relies heavily on custom game profiles to perform. Maybe today it'll work okay, but in a year or two? This thing has the speed to last that long but by then we'll have the Next Bestest Thing and they will want you to forget this ever existed. And the truth is it won't work with everything even today because they don't make profiles for every single game out there and some games simply do not scale with the way these setups split up the work.

When these dualie boards are as dependable as a single GPU design, then I'll consider them viable options. Well maybe not actually because there just aren't any games on the radar that are demanding enough to require something like this unless you need to push 3kx3k res or some such.

About noise and temps.

"tuned for low noise levels" so how come it is at the top in noise level with 280 SLI? Where's the low noise part? Low noise by being the loudest card you can buy?

The way I see the fans are still too bad on pretty much all cards.
"In other words, these temperatures are more or less by design and not necessarily a problem. "

It is a problem, I think my 4850 died prematurely just because of that. The fans on these cards, especially because of how hot they run is clearly inadequate. Make them larger by default and perhaps there would be no reason to purchase third party coolers. Enough of these crappy tiny fans. Give us bigger low RPM fans!

AMD luv's you at TR.

lol some one got butt hurt though.

http://www.guru3d.com/news/amd-messes-up-another-launch--4870-x2/

I found this just a bit ago for those who wanted to know if the 1GB 4870 was coming out.

http://www.powercolor.com/Global/products_features.asp?ProductID=2241

The more I look at these numbers, the better a Crossfired pair of 4850s looks. For under $350, you get a helluva lot of performance for the money.

I know ASUS came out with a 3850X2, I wonder if there would be a market for a 4850X2.

I'm not sure I buy AMD's line on this. My new HD 4850 was...seriously unstable...until I hand-edited a profile to force the fan on. Idling at 80 C, as far as I can tell (yes, not a certainty) was causing real problems. Now, it makes a decent but acceptable amount of noise, and idles at 45 C. :)

Like I said last time somewhere, the GTX cards need higher clock speeds - they don't seem to be memory-bound. Look at the first two games, they lead by considerable margins at the top resolution with antialias. That's not the resolution that the majority will use though, which is why they need clock speeds to fix the balance.

However, this review made me face something weird.
Crysis.
What is the bottleneck when the GTX 280 SLI is the same as the 9800 GTX SLI?

this thing is disgusting

Red fan in black shroud looks badass.

the sort of computing power that may one day enable men to figure out what women want

Hopefully not, as that will cause a permanent rift in the space-time continuum, and we've all seen how that video game turns out.

(Not that it stops people from trying. What do you think all that computing horsepower at CERN is really for? And why they're worried?)
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/24/large-hadron-collide.html

We'd really like to see AMD work more closely with game developers to implement profiles before new games are released

Or they could just let you create your own profile, like NVIDIA does.

Werent the 4870x2's supposed to be 15% than the cross fired 4870's? I saw it neck in neck in all the results.

and

It's been a while since ive been physically attracted to a video card. I like the black alot.

Crossfire-X?

I see the connector on that HD4870X2. Don't tell me that you weren't tempted to pair it with one or two of your HD4870 cards for that little extra something.

"These go to eleven."

Where are the 3-way crossfire benches?

Does anyone have a guess how this will scale with another 4870 (crossfireX)? If the way it's implemented in this card is different enough (Don't remember the specifics), could it limit the possibility for 3-way crossfire solutions?

I'm surprised to see all the tested games scaled well for the 4870 X2, given its only an engineering sample and probably using beta drivers.

So I can use this card with my existing 2-year-old Asus P5W64 WS motherboard, which has only one PCI-Express x16 slot, and it will run almost as fast as if I were to run two 4870s on a new PCI-e 2.0 motherboard? If so, that would save me a lot of dough!

i don't think i can fault AMD for the no super high end chip strategy, what kind of numbers have they ever sold on those kind of parts in the past? the high end parts sales numbers are probably utterly dwarfed by mainstream and low end sales.

they're putting their effort into squeezing more sales out of the midrange, with probably higher margins, as no money went into designing something more complex, and their design is probably more cost efficient as well

i say good for them

#5, Indeed it will be interesting. Anyone think this part will see a <$500 release?

Having designed cooling systems for diesel engines for emissions control, ATI has the classic problem on their hands. They can increase coolant (chip) temperature and say it's A-OK to run at those higher temps and consequently get by with a smaller radiator (heat sink/fan).

That lowers their cooling envelope size, but also necessitates higher air flow...which increases noise because axial fan tip speed is the main predictor of noise.

And it will shorten the life of the engine (chip).

I agree with #39. They should have done something like make a "triple" slot cooler or put on a ton of copper...or something. Nice new chips deserve a better cooling solution.

Geez, that's one warm card, well I suppose it's not so bad since all of th heat from that card is forced directly out the rear end of the case. Buuuut, I think I'll order an aftermarket cooler for it. Maby even a couple waterblocks as hot as it is =/

These results are also with a set of basically beta drivers because there hasn't been an "official" set of drivers for the 4800 series, just a "hot fix." The 4800 series doesn't even show up in their "find your card" list for drivers. I bet when the drivers come out, these test results will improve even more.

fp? did i manage it?