For the past year and a half ATI have had a tough time competing with NVIDIA at the high-end of the graphics card market. Products such as the Radeon HD 2900 and Radeon HD 3800 series struggled to perform at levels comparable to the GeForce 8800 and GeForce 9800 series however ATI did eventually work out a good pricing structure which made them attractive to consumers. More recently the launch of the Radeon HD 4800 series did two things. Firstly ATI had a card which performed at a similar level to the second fastest, the GeForce GTX 260. Secondly both the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 cards were priced very aggressively with a very tempting price to performance ratio. - DriverHeaven

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 (R700) Edition Board Preview

So what of a product to compete with the GeForce GTX 280? Well that is why we are here today, in the last day or so ATI supplied us with an early sample of the R700 giving us the opportunity to see how it compares to cards which are already on the market. We should however state that ATI have placed some limitations on what we can and cannot say about the R700 at this time and therefore a full outline of the card and performance analysis will be published at a later date. The R700 is reminiscent of the reference design Radeon HD 3870 X2 although it has gone through a slight makeover with the PCB and cooler.

The cooler is a two slot model and the fan blows air over two blocks of copper which draw heat from the GPU's and the air is then exhausted out of the case. The back features two retention brackets which hold the GPU blocks in place and there is also a large cover which acts as a heatsink for the memory that is installed on this side of the card. In terms of memory we have 1 GB of GDDR5 on each side of the card and each RV770 GPU has access to its own gigabyte. It is also possible to see the single CrossFire connector on the top right of the card which tells us we can add a second graphics card to our configuration.

To overclock the cards being tested today we used the driver control panel and initially let the software autotune before some final manual configuration. The overclock we achieved on the R700 was 15MHz core and 60MHz memory which would seem to be entirely down to this being an engineering sample. If experience with the Radeon HD 4870 is anything to go by we should expect about +800MHz on the core and +2000MHz on the memory on final production samples. It seems like for the first time in quite a while AMD are determined to put some real pressure on NVIDIA at the high-end of the graphics market.

In our limited testing it was clear to us that ATI have a product which is able to outperform the GeForce GTX 280, on occasion by quite some way. It is not completely dominant however and as games like Crysis show the GeForce GTX 280 is still capable of achieving higher frame rates than the R700. It should also be taken into account that the R700 relies on the driver to ensure both GPU's are fully utilised where as the GeForce GTX 280 always performs at its maximum level. We were also quite surprised to see that the drivers available for the R700 are quite mature, far more so than those of the Radeon HD 3870 X2 launch.

Other than a bug which affected Race Driver Grid we were able to complete the testing of our full review suite without issue. Really the only disappointment with the R700 at the moment is that we are still a few weeks away from it being available to buy. When it does launch we can expect better voltage control, improved drivers and a number of factory overclocked models which will further enhance performance. If ATI can deliver the product at a price which compares well with the GeForce GTX 280, which recently dropped as low as $499, then we have a very interesting couple of months ahead of us.