AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 images leaked, rumored for August release
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Jul 3rd 2008 3:38AM
posted Jul 3rd 2008 3:38AM
Read -- Leaked images
Read -- August launch
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single slot? interested in seeing the thermals on that card. (obviously there will be 3rd party vendors with various cooling solutions, but the amd design shows that its possible)
No way the 4870x2 will be single slot since the 4870 is double slot. Might be a 4 slot, but I don't know whether the 3870x2 is 4 slots or something. It's gonna be huge, but definitely will beat the GTX280 since we can already see how fast two 4870s are in Crossfire and they are ridiculously fast. This is very very cool. But I wonder, would two 4870x2s be faster than three GTX280s? Battle of the power-supply killing graphics cards commences!
Dual slot. Where did you get the idea it would be single slot from?
4 slots? someone is losing it. It looks very similar to the 3870 X2 PCB, which is dual slot. Its just quite long, the first poster probably got confused because the PCB itself is only one slot. In any case with CrossfireX you can double these up and get 4 GPUs, obviously it doesn't scale as well as with 2 but it works, so does a 4870 X2 + 4870 for 3 GPU
Why do video cards keep getting bigger (and in this case, longer) and running hotter (which thereby requries more power) when the rest of the industry is going the operate direction?
you mean opposite direction,
my guess is that with people who want top of the line, wont care much about power consumption or size as long as performance is the main objective
@waiownsyou
at least ATI/AMD aren't as bad as nvidia. Ati's power-hungry high-performance cards are well priced. $150 less for what will probably be a better card
I don't think that power supplies, processors, ram, motherboards or indeed ANY component in a high-performance system have been getting any smaller...
Yes, I meant OPPOSITE. Sorry, I'm really tired right now and this whole almost-four-month-Summer from college isn't helping.
But ed. brings up a good point. Why the heck are they getting more expensive too? I remember a time when the fastest video card barely even exceeded $450.
Those were the days.
technically you are wrong, for example, you can squeeze the power of the Radeon 7000 easily out of an integrated GPU on a laptop. but if you want the best the market is there. the best selling gpus have always been around that $100 to 200 mark so it really doesn't matter how much the fastest costs.
Also, 500 dollars back then is more now because of inflation.
Because its a big pissing contest to see who is top-of-the-benchmarks. More electrical power gets you more performance, so both companies will go within an inch of meltdown to bring the best performing card to the reviewers. Very few people actually buy these things though. At the low end you now have very capable and cheap integrated and add-in cards that take very little power, and are far more efficient - in terms of performance per watt - than anything that's come before.
Video cards and server processors are the only ones benefiting from Moores law. Moores law states the number of transistors you can put in a given area grows at an exponential rate. CPU's no longer know what to do with extra transistors, but you can always add a huge number of processing elements to a GPU and it will use all of them. So, CPU's are perennially focused on being more efficient and smarter, and GPUs are focused on turning Moores law into the biggest baddest processor arrays on the planet.
A single one of the GPU chips on this board has 800 individual shader processors. You can pick up one of those GPU's on a $200 AMD 4850 graphics card at your local Brick & Mortar today.
But will it play minesweeper?
Yeah, but only at 800x600 with under 30fps.
499! - no wonder people are buying consoles to play games.
OR 699 for the 280gtx which will be slower than this, whatever way you slice it, its still gonna be better than what we currently have
$500 is bargain compared to the $600+ that they are charging for GTX280.
Im not sure if you are trying to be disingenuously ignorant...
This thing is roughly 6-10 times more powerful than any console out there in terms of rendering capabilities, and is expected to launch at a price that puts NV's latest flagships to shame.
But at any rate, if you want something relatively cheap, and something that still shames any console by a wide margin, just invest $299 in the HD 4870, which is arguably still more powerful than every single console brand out there combined.
Heck, for < $150, you can have an 8800 GT, or for $199 an HD 4850, both of which once more, put consoles to shame in terms of displaying graphics.
console is not a feasible solution to many people, especially university students, who have co-op. we have to move from place to place almost every term. rarely any of us even have a TV. an all-in-one solution (PC) would easily dominate this market.
An all in one system IS dominating the market: it's called a console. A console is a PC without the headaches: load times, OS price and instability, or upgrading your system every year because the industry develops games for top of the line systems not your year old machine. I know console have their problems too, but you can't compare them to PC problems. A good gaming PC is as big or bigger than any console out there, and you can connect any console to a monitor using the right device so you don't need to have a TV.
As long as video cards cost as much as a console, I'm going to stick to buying a console. I seriously doubt any
@Dee: consoles don't have load times???
where you been, buddy?
Also, I built my most recent rig for under $600 (including 19 inch monitor and pretty decent speakers). And it'll still kick the ass of any PS3 up and down the block.
@ Dee. Yeah gotta love how consoles take out all the hassel. Like how you have to install console games now. Or how you have to update the games to fix patches from crap servers that take days to update. Or my personal favorite UPDATING BETA DEMOS on PS3's. And load times; yeah that went out with PS2. And you can so upgrade your console to better those annoying load times. Your so right Dee, I had to update my system......never. It is 2 years old and I still can play 99% of games at Mid to high settings (depending on how well the company wrote the code). All in one.....because it will play Blu-ray right? Post "all-in-one" when your console can burn ANYTHING, play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, help you wrote Python code for your class assignment, record live TV like TIVO, allow you to customize everything down to the most insignificant detail....ya know like my system.
I hate it when the console playing peasants dare speak to the PC gaming master race.
@Dee, assuming everything you said is right. how does that solve our no-TV problem? and do you actually expect me to do my assignments on a console + TV? TV's resolution is simply too low, and 1080p HD-TVs are impossible to carry. don't say "just use a TV-tuner on your PC", cuz that automatically proves that PC dominates by default.
not to mention that as a software engineering student, i wouldn't bother writing any codes on a cell processor with quite limited memory availability.
The thing about consoles is you don't have to divide you recources between the game and your PC stuff. Any PC you can get now can tear up my Super Nintendo at gaming, but the SNES dosen't slow down or have windows pop up because of my normal background programs.
Not that I like consoles enough to have bought one in the last 12 years.
Dear J,
My computer does just out do SNES in gaming, it plays SNES games while doing it. Pop-ups, background crap.....huh? Dude you need to get your system in check because you are pretty much alone on that one.
HOLY CRAP.. thats what the AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 looks like???
Sure am glad that was leaked!
I was just about to get some Nikon glass...
But I think I'll get two of these, a DFI Lanparty UT X48 DDR3 mobo, 8 gigs of DDR3 ram, and an E8400 instead.
AMD are doing well just lately, hope they don't screw up :)
$499??? That's insane. Can't wait for nVidia's response.
As for the cooling.... Judging by estimated price - which is below 2*priceof(4870) - might be they have turned down some factory overclocking which is obviously applying to single chip 4870 cards. Lower performance - lower price.
Also, if one would multiply power consumption of 4870 by two, then you really need to have some huge power supply. During 4870 in crossfire tests people complained that they needed >1000W power supply for system to be stable. Again, decreasing speed of 4870 as used in X2 might be a solution for stable system with say 600W power supply (because theoretically it should be enough to power two RV770).
P.S. conspiracy theory of a day: AMD/ATI thrown in the rumored price to be far below gtx280 to try to piss nVidia.
You are an idiot, nvidias response was the 280GTX, this is AMD's response to that. AMD are launching this $100 less than the GTX, and with rebates the AMD card will come out top dog.
It has two tera flops performance????? :) super computer in a desktop..
Assuming you compare it to a supercomputer that does only single precision math of course.
Still damn fast I gotta say, if it would ever come about.
A single 4870's dual precision maxes out somewhere under 300 GFLOPs... that is... ludicrous. Its nearly three times IBM's latest HPC variant of its Cell processor; the PowerXCell 8i. NV's GTX 280 maxes out at ~125 GFLOPs DP.
Now double that for this card and you are at .6 TFLOPS for DP.
AMD has finally clobbered NVidia. Download your SDK's here: http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/sdkdwnld.html
The 9800 GX2 costs around $550. If this is priced at $499 it'll probably give Nvidia a scare. The HD 4850 and HD 4870 is already causing them to rattle just when they thought their 8800 GT and GTS have become the budget kill of the hill.
It's good to see ATI back in the game, and I heard they'll also be pushing the All-In-Wonder Radeons back! Hurray!
The 9800 GX2 is already hitting $400. In a month it'll be lower.
The price of the 9800 GTX dropped about $100 in a couple days after the GTX 200 series was released.
Even the GTX 260s and 280s are going on sale already. I'm hoping for a $300-$350 GTX 260 by the end of this month.
This card will grind a 9800 GX2 into dust. It'll almost certainly man-handle a pair of GX2s. The 9800 is a very last gen design, and doesnt have nearly the memory bandwidth.
2GB of RAM ?? Good luck running that in a 32bit OS (maximum total memory of 4GB all together). You may have the fastest video card around, but your system RAM just got chopped in half. Vista 64 bit edition will be your only real option for gaming with this card.
I have to agree. In a 32 bit OS, I do believe because of the limited memory architecture, your video card, motherboard, and RAM (correct me if there is more, I dont mind) take up the available addressing space (4 gb). That is why, anyone with a halfway decent video card, and 4 gigs or ram may notice their system (for Vista users this is pre-SP1' dirty little trick that makes you think you "have" 4 gigs of ram) will only register 3.2 approx. gigs of ram.
@dagwood, I belive ATI may be aiming these cards at 64 bit users a little more this time around if that is the case. 64 bit has to be supported sometime. All of us can't stay stuck on 32 bit architecture forever as memory is going up and up, and many programs and games get more demanding.
It will be interesting to see the size, but I guarantee all that it will be a double slot, as per previous cards. 4 slot someone said? Give me a break. The power reqs. will be through the roof, that is for sure...
Anyone who's going to spend $499 on a video card more than likely already has at least 4GB of memory and should be already running a 64 bit OS.
You retards due realize that your GPU RAM has nothing to do with the 32-bit SYSTEM memory limit, right? You guys are joking. I mean I figured one would understand that dedicated card meant that the card was basically a separate....well computer that your system sends process requests to. Your 32-bit OS doesn't register your GPU RAM as part of your total RAM....well because it can't directly access it.
Computer gamers that don't know how this works....FAIL.
I must agree with laughing man
Here you go Laughing Man and initialxy
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/01/14/windows-vista-32-bit-and-64-bit-x86-and-x64-maximum-supported-ram-physical-memory-limit/
Didn't want to call you out without proof :)
@z0phi3l, thanks for the good article. you win.
@ z0phi3l
Thank you for point out what I already know. I never said there was no limit. I said that your DEDICATED GPU didn't affect it. Everything is that article is 100% correct, to bad it assumes that (like more than 65% of our PC users) your GPU is intergrated. Intergrated graphics due suck up address because the motherboard will access it directly. A dedicated card handles all that work.....which is why dedicated GPU's will have memory address limits in their specs.
@Laughing Man
I don't know why you insist on making fun of people when you are incorrect yourself. Just like other hardware on the PCI bus, graphics cards do have their on board memory 'memory-mapped' into the addressable 32-bit address space. It's just never been a noticeable issue until recently because lots of people didn't have 4GB of RAM and graphics cards weren't 1GB or greater. Check out this article from dansdata that does a pretty good job explaining:
http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
I also have to add that I do believe that the 9800 GX2 was two circuit boards slapped together, essentially 2 9800 boards soldered together, then piped through the one PCI-E bus of course. This is one of the few cards that actually has the 2 GPU's on ONE board. Correct me if im wrong of course. :)
Are they going to solve the supply issue with GDDR5? It's already tough enough to find a regular 4870.
It's hard to find 4870s because not a lot of them have been released to channel.
I'm nVidia fanboy but I think that this just might dethrone the GTX 280 in some games (and lose terribly in others).
Actually, it's the 9800 GX2 it's trying to dethrone. The GX2 outguns the GTX 280, 260 and the HD 4870 by a wide margin in gaming benchmarks.
Have you not seen the benchmarks where the 4870 kills that card in nearly everything? This is just going to kill it even harder.
Nvidia has failed, hard.
@Schfelzerberg: only in a couple of last gen gaming tests. with any kind of moderately complex shaders, the 4870 smashes a GX2. heres crysis:
http://www.guru3d.com/news/ati-radeon-hd-4870-vs-geforce-9800-gx2-benchmark-results/
again, the 9800 GX2 uses last gen processors.
Is it really leaked images or strategically released images?
I'm looking forward to seeing what will be available. Several months ago I bought a 8800GT by MSI that had a VERY quiet cooling solution on board. I didn't have to install my own GPU cooler and it was about the same price as those with loud stock coolers.
If MSI or someone makes something with a seriously quite GPU cooler I'd be very insterested in what this card has to offer.
I don't ever want to have to buy a replacement GPU cooler for an extra $20-$40 when companies like MSI can make the units prebuilt with good GPU coolers for the same price as a stock unit.
@z0phi3l, in reference to your last post
Just to clear things up about "integrated graphics solutions" vs. "dedicated graphics solutions" I would like to say...the article that you provided, though it is factual regarding memory usage by the an x86 system, is referring to a system that uses an integrated graphics solution (meaning that the graphics card will share share memory with the system RAM and will be set aside for that use...although it can be dynamic memory allocation by the system as the video card requests more address space, but that is a different topic). At any rate, the AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 , which is the subject of this article, uses a dedicated graphics solution. This means that the graphics "on-board RAM" is addressable and usable by the graphics card only. The system processor will not even have a way to address this memory. That memory is used only by the graphics card when performing algorithmic matrix multiplications (among other calculations) that require a certain algorithmic approach requiring large amounts of storage space.
Hope this helps. =)
Thanks i was gonna straighten these punks out but was too lazy to type it all out. ;)
Well you'd be wrong, the 4gb limit is a limit for ANY type of memory on a PC, not just onboard, but also add in Video Cards, don't know where you're getting your info but it's been common knowledge that even add in cards contribute towards the 4gb limit.
while web wiki pages arent always the best source of information, i believe that these articles can help make clear my point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Memory_Architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit#Dedicated_graphics_cards
I hold a computer science degree and have been in the computing industry for quite a while. I have to agree with mak163 and disagree with the article posted earlier. The dedicated memory on a graphics card is not addressed by the OS. Rather, this is handled by the graphics card. This is also why I have a Windows XP machine with 4GB of memory and a 512mb graphics card in my machine and still have all 4GB available to me. All 32bit does is limit your address space. In other words, once you run out of unique addresses you can't directly reference that memory any more. Hence, there is only a limit on memory as far as what the 32bit OS addresses. Seeing as your OS is not addressing the graphics memory this is not an issue. The servers I run at work also have RAID cards with their own memory in them and this also does not limit the max memory as the OS does not reference the RAID card memory, the RAID card does that. The article listed previously was misinformed and did not make a distinction between shared system memory and dedicated memory. Some graphics cards do use shared memory in addition to dedicated graphics memory but this is a separate issue.
while, as a master's degree candidate, i dont believe wiki pages are the best source of information...i believe that these pages will help make clear my point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Memory_Architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit#Dedicated_graphics_cards
I think one day GPU's are gonna need their own towers if this keeps up....
I am just hating all over the engadget lately. This was leaked almost a weak ago and you are just now posting on this. Just wow! If some apple product is leaked or doesn't exist, but might exist or is an obvious photoshop we get an article on it. Do you have any real journalists on here I did a Google search on the 4870 X2 (which is an obvious next step since the 4870 has been released almost the same day the 4870 was announced) and got the full skinny before this article went up. Epic Fail Engadget. This just in Apple to release 3G iPhone on obscure phone company in another country no one cares about! OMG I can't believe it. If it weren't for the occasional interesting article or real piece of interesting technology being release all I would ever read about are Apple products, how much Microsoft sucks, and the latest really shitty netbook. Do they ever put anything on those product specific sub-blogs of engadget that doesn't go on the engadget home page. Me thinks they need to create a few more sub-blogs and filter out some of the obvious stuff like HP is refreshing their entire laptop line that is home page worthy, but you don't have to tell us every time they release all the details about each refresh on the home page we know when the hardware vendors release a new product it will probably end up in each vendors line we don't have to know about each model and what iteration of said hardware is in it. They are generally going to build a laptop with each possible configuration they can.