Well every now and then a manufacturer tries to do something odd, you know something different with a product. That is much respected, as we like diversity, products that bring in some x-factor or just something that's fresh and new. Now, sometimes that works out really well, and sometimes it just doesn't. Even after spending two test days with the product we are looking at today. We still haven't made up our mind with what the conclusion for this product is going to be like. Meet Palit's Revolution 700 Deluxe. It's a Radeon HD 4870 X2 with 2GB memory based graphics bard that comes with custom cooling, slightly higher memory clocks and some serious connectivity to get you going for more. - Guru3D

Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe (R700) CrossFire Preview

The heart of the product does not hold one, but two RV770 GPU's guaranteeing you a very fine 3D gaming performance. The X2 cards that have been released will be available in many configurations. Board partners are free in their choices. It surely does take them a while but you will see X2 based cards with Radeon HD 4850 specific GDDR3 memory configurations and Radeon HD 4870 cards with a number of GDDR5 memory configurations. And you also need to be aware of that when purchasing the product that the memory will be cloned. So far we have checked some reference based samples, meaning the 2GB cards.

Just the minute AMD launched it's RV770 chipset, AMD effective doubled up performance over the last-gen product especially for you at a very acceptable price level. The RV770 chip is built upon a 55nm fabrication process and AMD put nearly a billion transistors into that GPU. The Radeon HD 4800 series have 800 scalar sub-processors and now have a significant forty texture units. And a Radeon HD 4850 X2 or Radeon HD 4870 X2 card has two of the aforementioned RV770 cores embedded onto the PCB each with it's own assigned frame buffer. The two GPU's are bridged with the help of a PCI Express chip, generation two.

Did the sheer size already get your attention already? Mind you that at the front side where you see the yellow logo, a plastic protection payer is still present. And yeah, there's no doubt it's huge man. The R700 has a metal plate across the back of the card just like the older Radeon HD 3870 X2 and quite interestingly, it also has memory chips on the back. We peek a little inside the cooler, the cooler itself consists out of two 80mm fans. It is a quad heatpipe based cooling solution covering the two GPU's. You need to connect both the 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors, to get this graphics card working correctly.

As most of you with most video cards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple tamper with image quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far. The default clock for this product is 750MHz on the core, we ended at 825MHz. The memory however was more promising. ATI reference default is 3600MHz effective, we could push it easily towards 4572MHz memory bandwidth. However we stopped, as the overclock does not matter much.

It really is extraordinary how much pixels this video card can poop out with each second that passes. When the two GPU's work, they push performance to a new level. However we do stand by our original opinion though that it is inevitable you will run into some troubles with an X2. And a problem right now is that ATI uses game profiles in their drivers to enable and apply optimal settings for multi GPU configurations, this also means that the driver needs to activate the second GPU for CrossFireX mode. That's all fine and normal but the downside is simple, if your driver does not have the game profile, just one GPU will render the game.

Right, we're done with the dissatisfaction as that's not what the product is about. The GPU's are responsible for an incredible amount of horsepower. Due to it's sheer size the Palit Revolution 700 definitely will not be everybody's cup of tea and for that reason alone this conclusion as a bit of a mixed bag really. If you can live with the bulky size then you'll adore the better temperatures, fantastic performance and fairly low noise level it produces. The one thing we like to see is innovation and product differentiation, and Palit certainly exceeded themselves with this product.