AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 images leaked, rumored for August release

Is this the Radeon card destined to leapfrog NVIDIA's performance leading GTX 200 series? We'll know in August (or soon thereafter), that's the rumored release date for AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. As the X2 name implies, the card packs a pair of RV770-based GPUs and should be ready to sample with 2GB (!) of that "world's fastest" GDDR5 memory by the end of this month. It's worth noting that the leaked images show a total of 1GB of GDDR5 (16 Qimonda GDDR5 chips) on that black PCB. AMD will then make the 4870 X2 (RV770XT) cards available to its partners in mid-August, hitting retail soon after for an estimated $499 according to sources over at DigiTimes.

Read -- Leaked images
Read -- August launch

[BoullionCube Posted Jul 3rd 2008 10:26AM]

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.

[Jesse S Posted Jul 3rd 2008 12:24PM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 3rd 2008 10:07PM]

@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.

[macha88 Posted Jul 3rd 2008 12:04PM]

Is it really leaked images or strategically released images?

[boe Posted Jul 3rd 2008 12:44PM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 3rd 2008 3:44PM]

@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. =)

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 3rd 2008 5:19PM]

Thanks i was gonna straighten these punks out but was too lazy to type it all out. ;)

[z0phi3l Posted Jul 3rd 2008 5:38PM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 3rd 2008 3:51PM]

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

[Tyguy Posted Jul 3rd 2008 7:15PM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 3rd 2008 3:51PM]

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

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 3rd 2008 8:48PM]

I think one day GPU's are gonna need their own towers if this keeps up....

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 4th 2008 12:30AM]

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.