After casting an eye over XFX's Radeon HD 4850 XXX card last week, this week it's the turn of their take on AMD's flagship graphics board, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 version. It may no longer be the king of the hill since the launch of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 card, but it still packs more than enough graphics processing punch for all but the most demanding of users. Now unlike many of XFX's other offerings, and this particular board uses both AMD's reference clock speeds and cooling solution, and as we've seen similarly specified boards from other vendors in the past this allows us to investigate a couple of additional angles. We will be taking a look at how performance has changed with new drivers. - Elite Bastards

XFX Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB Design Version Preview

As we have just mention, XFX have chosen to stick to both the reference clock speeds and cooling solution for this particular offering, but let's take a look at the card itself nonetheless. Now the use of a reference cooler means that we have a hefty, dual slot affair, designed to pull in cool air, pushing it over both of the two RV770 cores on the board before exhausting it through the rear of the chassis. We have to say that the XFX sticker on the cooler is pretty though. Pretty scary that is. While 1GB of the board's memory is on the front of the PCB, the other eight modules sit beneath the head spreader situated on the rear of the card.

It may only use AMD's reference cooling solution, but let's take a look at how our particular XFX Radeon HD 4870 X2 fares in the realms of overclocking, using the Overdrive tool present within the Catalyst drivers to overclock both of the board's cores. Now starting out with those core clock speeds, we managed to squeeze a modest 40MHz increase out of them, giving us a new core clock of 790MHz. Meanwhile, the 2GB of GDDR5 memory on board gave us a little more headroom to play with, allowing us to reach a stable maximum of just 3880MHz, a 280MHz increase overall. Both represent a nice increase and extra boost in performance.

Having examined several other Radeon HD 4870 X2 boards in the past, there isn't too much more we can say without repeating ourselves. While AMD's flagship may no longer be the king of the hill in performance terms thanks to the release of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 video card, it's still fast enough to provide playable performance at those ultra widescreen resolutions with anti-aliasing enabled in the majority of titles, which should remain enough to satisfy the 30inch display owners. Probably the best news to come out of our testing are the improvements that came from the move to AMD's latest Catalyst 9.1 drivers.

So in virtually all the CPU limited situations we came upon, using this new driver gave us some pretty impressive increases in performance, which is always good to see. While most of these scenarios and titles were already playable with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 using older drivers, you can't say no to more performance when it comes from a simple download and install. While it may be surprising, and almost disappointing to see XFX sticking to AMD's reference specifications for this particular release, given how much raw power the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has at its disposal it's quite difficult to argue the need for factory overclocking.

And a custom cooling solution would have been good, as GPU temperatures under load do shoot up very high at times and we think it's fair to say this isn't the most efficient cooler we've ever seen, but then again the Radeon HD 4850 XXX edition we looked at last week from XFX was the exception rather than the rule from this partner when it comes to the use of a non reference cooler. The good news that comes from this particular board is that it threatens to be very price competitive. XFX's take on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is in there amongst the cheapest that we've seen on the market, and there are some excellent deals.

Add to that XFX's apparent support commitments, just you have yourself a pretty well rounded product for the enthusiast sector, and based around an graphics solution that fears no one when it comes to gaming performance. That's what it is all about for XFX providing the best gaming experience as they possibly can.