We just love water cooling. It's that badge of honour that shows you are a true enthusiast that you're not going to let the threat of a few leaks and kinked tubing stop you from reaching those ever elusive higher clock speeds. However, entry to the water coolers club means building a water cooling loop, which is traditionally a very daunting task the first time. Cutting hoses to the right length, clamping jubilee clips and then the nerve shredding process of filling your loop and praying to the digital gods that you don't spring a leak. Now well, the building your first successful water cooling loop provides an enormous feeling of accomplishment, and a bit of experience goes a long way to reach that goal. - Bit-Tech

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic Bi-GPU Preview

Which is just a shame really, as water cooling provides very real benefits in comparison to air cooling in both thermal and acoustic performance. The problem is making something as fragile, bulky and potentially dangerous as water cooling safe to use as a cooling solution for your product and making it compatible with the maximum amount of setups. Enter Sapphire and its Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic. Incorporating not only a heavily overclocked version of ATI's dual GPU graphics monster, but also a fully pre-assembled and filled water cooling loop from Asetek for both the GPU and the CPU too, all cooled by a single radiator.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic looks to impress from the very start and is shipped in a very swish padded flight case, with the graphics card and accompanying water cooling loop pre-assembled and ready to go right from the off. That's right, absolutely no assembly required. At its heart sits quite possibly the fastest single slot retail graphics card we've ever tested in the form of a heavily overclocked Radeon HD 4870 X2. With the benefit of water cooling on its side Sapphire really hasn't held back and has upped the card's default clocks to a whopping 800MHz core and 4000MHz effective memory speed.

While the 50MHz increase in core is welcome, it's the 400MHz improvement to the memory clock that will have the biggest impact in modern games. The card itself is still a stock ATI Radeon 4870 X2 at heart, with identical components to an air cooled version, but the cooling solution is far from standard issue. Despite its performance improvements and cooling abilities, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic was always going to struggle when it came down to value. Sapphire will be selling this card for an eye watering $650, making it the single most expensive consumer class graphics card currently available.

We find the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic card in something of an odd position. It is unquestionably the fastest single consumer graphics card currently available to buy. Its water cooling loop is also able to keep the GPU remarkably cool, significantly more so than a stock card and much quieter in doing so as well. The problem lies in not only the price, which borders on the ridiculous, but the knock on effects of putting such a high thermal output card into such a relatively small water cooling loop. The CPU temperatures suffer terribly to the point that even a $25 aftermarket cooler will comfortably outperform it.

What this product is then, is niche. In fact, it's a niche within a niche. It's for those looking for the absolute fastest graphics card without the hassle of building a water loop themselves and have money to burn. If you fall into this then the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic is just great product that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. It's the fastest consumer card in the world right now, is an absolute breeze to fit, and runs cooler than a stock card by a wide margin even under load. But you will have to put down some hard cash to get one, and in fact this is also a special edition with very limited stock.

If however you're like the rest of us who don't have the best part of $750 to spend on a single graphics card or even fancy being brave enough to try putting together your own water cooling loop, then this isn't such a success. Similar performance can be had at a much cheaper price point really by either water cooling and overclocking the stock Radeon HD 4870 X2, or by picking up a pair of GeForce GTX 260 cards and running them in SLI mode. While respectively more difficult to install than and not as elegant as the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic, you will save a packet either way.