Radeon HD 4870 X2
The big Kahuna, the mighty one, the card with the biggest balls. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will by far be the fastest consumer graphics card anno winter 2008 and it is mighty impressive. The combination of the two RV770 processors used and the excellent bandwidth the GDDR5 memory provides for these graphics processors to do it's workload in, is breathtaking.

Once the Radeon HD 4850/4870/RV770 was released, NVIDIA was like 'WTF?'. This product was the reason for NVIDIA to immediately drop it's prices on three of their products. The 9800 GTX, and GTX 260 & 280. This fact alone should tell you how competitive the Radeon HD 4870 really is. And now AMD put two of them on one board. So you'll now get to play around with 2.4 TFLOPS of RAW computing power.

You will notice that AMD's board partners will have higher clock frequencies on this product compared to the 4850 X2, boosting out some more performance. Yet more importantly, this is the product is equipped with with GDDR5 memory. And GDDR5 seems to rock for sure.

There are some distinct advantages to be found for GDDR5 memory. It's has much higher frequency based memory versus tight timings. GDDR5 memory will leverage overall peak bandwidth to 3.6 Gbps / 3600 MHz effectively. And that's just fanatical fast (GDDR3 on 4850 = 2.0 Gbps). And heck, it's just the beginning. I will not be surprised to see GDDR5 running at 4,5 maybe even 6 GHz in the upcoming 12 months.

The memory bandwidth is massively important to the RV770, but next to that there is a significant higher clock frequency (opposed to the 4850 X2) for the core/shader domain, 750 MHz will be the default clock frequency and memory wise again... the frequency is 3600 MHz. The TDP for this product is set at 286 Watt, which indeed is quite a lot.