Asus cools down the HD4870X2, we run it on Core i7

AMD's GRAPHICS ARM, known as ATI in the olden days, did a pretty decent job with the R700 card and its dual RV770 chips - the HD4870X2 has only recently been beaten by Nvidia with its GTX295 dual GPU contraption.

However, the X2 was, and still is, a pretty hot card in terms of both popularity and temperatures achievable. I didn't need to poke about with a thermometer to feel the heat reaching close to the water boiling point around the thingie when running, and noticeably heating up the air in the whole PC, for that matter.

The big graphics card vendors had two options on hand: one, improve the air cooling to the point that enables fully stable operation with some overclocking thrown in easily, or two, slap on some exotic cooling option like a water or vapour chamber. Asus opted for the first one, while Sapphire went with the second one. Here's the first look at the Asus offering.

We put together the card on our trusty old Nehalem reference testbed: Intel's Core i7 965 extreme flavour sitting on an Asus P6T Deluxe mobo, this time with 3GB of Kingston DDR3-2000 memory. With the most recent BIOSes, this platform is rock-solid at 4 GHz CPU speed and DDR3-1866 memory, all air cooled.

Air cooled is the name of the game for the Asus HD4870X2 too... and lots of air, at that. Three synced fans with a jet engine effect, according to Asus, reduce the temperatures by up to some 24ºC compared to the reference board, and provide for some nice O/C margins - like, for instance, running both GPUs at 800 MHz, and memory at GDDR3-4000 speed. I could even complete the 3Dmark Vantage round at that speed setting - provided I added another fan to blow some air on the back of the card PCB. Knowing it was 32ºC in Singapore this past Sunday, we can tolerate it.

Nevertheless, to avoid any bias finger pointing, here are the performance and extreme results for 3DMark Vantage on the card's default clocks with our dearest 4 GHz Nehalem.

So, the card sat on top of the Intel platform, in her favourite position, made quite a bit of noise while doing it – far less than her reference sister, though – and performed well in this particular session of passion. Yes, it stayed cool all the way, too. A good match for these initial Nehalems, definitely.

The only issue is its thickness. The card takes something like two and-a-half slots and, while some of my boards have three-slot spacing between the graphics slots for Crossfire, it may not  always be the case if you want dual-card operation. On the other hand, if you get this kind of card, you'll rarely have a need for a second one.

If you're looking for something slimmer, the Sapphire water-cooled 4870X2 offering may be an interesting option, provided you can handle the added baggage of mandatory common CPU cooling and hanging its radiator somewhere else within your PC house. We'll be looking at that one as well soon. µ

Good
Cool operation at full speed and decent overclock without exotic stuff
Bad
It'd be good if the total thickness could be compressed somewhat
Ugly
It's one fat card

Bartender's Verdict
8 out of 10