Being king of the hill is such a fleeting thing most of the time. The battle to get there is often arduous, and the taste of victory is sweet, but it is usually short lived, succumbing to the one behind you in their quest to reach the top. And so it goes, and the cycle extends to graphics cards to be sure, ATI and NVIDIA forever battling like two Titans. And titans they are since a while now with great and powerful products. Today we'll be looking at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. It has been out for a while now, but it still certainly appears to be a card worthy to sit atop the mountain. Indeed, it features two GPU's on one card, and is gigantic, in more ways than one. - PureOC

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Graphics Board Review

The most prominent feature of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is its sheer size, this card is long. It features a stock dual slot, dual contact heatsink to keep the dual GPU's cooler and quieter. The heatsink covers the entire card, and is absurdly heavy. This card is definitely the heaviest that we've ever held. It's a good looking card though, black and sleek. For those of you with a smaller mid-tower case, you may have problems with the length of this card, depending on your internal case layout. This graphics card will also put quite a bit of weight tugging on the mainboard. And a support bar is definitely useful if your case has one.

The rear of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 sports two dual link DVI connectors and a TV output port as well. Again, standard issue in cards these days. Overclocking a Radeon HD 4870 X2 card is probably an exercise in wasted time, to be honest. Working with dual GPU cores is not easy to begin with, and considering the performance of this card at stock speeds, the resulting increases will be nominal at best. The return simply isn't worth the effort and risk. That being said, we did overclock this card to see what we could achieve, and the final result of our overlock was 790/3700MHz stable, a minor increase from the stock clocks.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 is indeed a monster of a card, the veritable king of the hill for now. It displays some stunning performance numbers, chewing up most of our benchmarks and the rest of the competition for now. That is somewhat to be expected, however, as it is a dual GPU card and comparing apples to oranges is really only good for showing. Now in any event, the card's performance is oustanding, and scales extremely well in some games, with Call of Duty 4 being most notable. However, it doesn't scale well in others, so it really depends on what games you play and whether you'll see an increase or not.

But for sure it does have the horsepower to produce very playable frame rates in just about any game, even at higher resolutions with the eye candy enabled. No other single card really can boast that claim to that degree at this point. There are a few drawbacks to mention that are probably already obvious, but we'll point them out anyways. Overclocking this card is frankly a waste of time and effort, the risk isn't worth the reward. The temperatures are also a bit on the high side, and although the card is designed to withstand it, the interior temperature of your case will suffer a bit more as a result, so take some precaution upfront.

Our recommendations are to manually set the fan speed to about forty percent which seems to achieve a nice balance between temperatures and noise levels. This card also does pull some serious electricity when it's running in 3D gaming mode. Lastly, performance like this also commands a premium price, although that is certainly to be expected for cutting edge technology and ground shaking performance. But all of these issues are really inherent to having a card like this anyways, making these points probably moot because if you aren't willing to accept the tradeoffs then you'll be looking at a baby Radeon instead.

Boasting stunning performance and excellent features in a sleek package, this Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 is king of the hill for now at least and maybe a bit longer, and easily chewing through modern games for those consumers with higher resolution monitors, with high expectations and high budgets.