With games ramping up their requirements and with the never ending needs of enthusiasts on the rise, it seems like everyone is looking for a more powerful GPU that offers speed they need right now, and that little extra umph for future proofing. And others are just looking for blazing fast frame rates with immersive graphics, while just a select few are looking not only for blazing graphics performance, but a world record class GPU. ATI has released the Radeon HD 4870 line which is a very capable GPU that the average enthusiast would be content with. Then they upped the ante with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, currently the most powerful single card GPU in the world. - Bjorn3D

Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB Graphics Board Review

Not that it's a single GPU, but in fact it's two GPU's married on one PCB. We've got it for you to gander at, and we're gonna drive it like we stole it. Just looking at the Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 you can tell you're not looking at your dad's GPU. When you first get it out of the box the sheer weight of it will give you a moments thought about hanging it sideways in your chassis. We had no problem getting it in our chassis after we got it off the test station, but if you have one of those small mid towers we'd think twice. Taking a look at the back of the GPU you can see where the two physical cores are, and more stickers than one should suffer.

That's a manly looking GPU if you ask us, not one of those single slot models that make the ego feleing deflated. Carry that bad boy into a LAN party inside a windowed chassis and they'll know you're serious about your gaming. Looking at the end of the GPU we see the same dual slot arrangement we have been accustomed to since the GeForce 8800 GTX series came out. The bundle has all the needed hardware for you to get up and running, but any time we see a major GPU without a full game title we still cringe. We were quite pleased with the performance of the Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics accelerator.

It churns out frame rates like no other board we have checked, and it does it consistently. We didn't discover any driver glitches or experience any problems with the GPU whatsoever. And the Radeon HD 4870 X2 tore up the synthetic benchmarks and scored well ahead of every GPU we had to throw against it. We even ran it in TriFire with another Radeon HD 4870 and it was well behaved in CrossFire. We ran it on all our standard games and a few others, like Far Cry 2 and it ran well in all the games. We kicked the fan up, which was almost silent, and temperatures were more than acceptable for a dual GPU single PCB card.

Other than being a little warm for our tastes and being a little pricey, we didn't find anything else we didn't like about it. If you're looking at this caliber GPU for your rig though, price probably isn't your largest concern. If it came down to it and we were stuck on that mythical desert island and could only have one GPU, it would have to be the Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. The Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the fastest GPU we've ever seen. Driving it to it's fullest capacity in DirectX 10 on some of the most demanding games, it never failed to deliver blazing fast performance.