ATI R700 Previews On The Web, Card To Hit Stores On 08/13

 

Mountain House (CA) - The first batch of R700 previews hit the Internet today as AMD lifted the news embargo for a very limited number of hardware review websites. Some of the spurned sites, like Guru of 3D (Guru3D.com), were furious and made their emotions public.

In fact, Guru of 3D was so furious in regards to AMD that they published the launch date for the product. We know that R700 line-up will consist out of two graphics cards, one cheaper and one more expensive one. Look for Radeon 4850 X2 1GB and 4870 X2 2GB in your favorite retail/e-tail store on August 13.

"The expensive one" was previewed on AnandTech, HardOCP, Tech Report and so on.

As you can see for yourself, ATI Radeon 4870 X2 even with beta BIOS and drivers has a lot of potential. ATI increased the CrossFire bandwidth from 6 to 20 GB/s, while PCIe bridge chip was moved from Gen1 to Gen2 (PEX8547 chip was replaced with PEX8647/8), even though this increased latency from 110ns to 140ns.

We were worried about continuous PLX’s PCI Express bridge chips, since 3870 X2 suffered from microstuttering, a problem with multi-gpu solutions rendering frames at different times resulting in long delay between two frames.

Even though PLX864x chip features increased latency, Sampsa Kurri at Xtremesystems.org reported that ATI finally fixed microstuttering with 4870 X2. With this issue gone, it seems that AMD finally has a winner on their hands.

  • eklipz330
    HardOCP and Tech Report links didn't work for me

    looks good for ati/amd...i wonder how the 4850x2 will do...hmmm
    Reply
  • eklipz330
    and its good to see at the very least, the 4870x2 performs on par with the 4870 cf...
    Reply
  • Lunarion
    I really hope this doesn't require more than a 650w PSU. I just built a new system with a "bad" video card (9600gso OC) to wait for this thing to come out. Glad I did wait.
    Reply
  • NarwhaleAu
    Poor form to leave out Guru3D, but by the sounds of things someone released these samples to the few review sites as a sort of teaser rather than fully fledged review.
    Reply
  • V8VENOM
    I'll be ready to drop two 4870X2 in my system...let me set my "Add to Cart" site surfing software going... ;)
    Reply