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My last review looked at a midrange offering from Gigabyte, the nVidia based 9800GT. We concluded that as long as you didn’t expect to run your games at high resolutions, and were prepared to compromise on lower to medium detail settings, the 9800GT may be right for you.

This time around we have the pleasure of putting Asus’ top of the range ATI card through its paces. The 4870X2 comprises of two 4870 Graphics Processing Units (GPU) on one Printed Circuit Board (PCB) partnered with 2 GB of blistering GDDR5 RAM! The 4870X2 is billed as the most powerful single slot solution. Effectively it is two cards on one PCB. Expectations are high, as is the price. The Asus EAH 4870 X2 TOP will retail in the UK at around the £400 mark.  Your average HD 4870 X2 will set you back around £350, so we ought to see that little bit extra from the EAH4870X2 TOP.

Asus aims stand out from the pack by producing a card that arrives in the store pre-overclocked. Asus are not the first company to follow this strategy, and no doubt will not be the last. This approach has been employed a number of years. I recall owning a GeForce 3 Golden Sample from Gainward. In those days my reasoning for buying pre-overclocked cards was partly informed by the assumption that manufactures would speed pin their products, and select those cards that would tolerate high speeds.

However, over the years I have seen standard cards match the ‘special ones’, and am not entirely convinced that any selection process has taken place. As a result I am now more likely to overclock the product myself. That sense of anticipation in finding out the true limit of your hardware is an enjoyable, if not anxious experience, as you push your expensive new toy to the max. Testing sample hardware in the lab takes you away that thrill, simply because you haven’t invested your own hard earned cash for it.

Where I feel Asus has missed a trick is in not supplying an aftermarket cooler, especially as they are overclocking a high speed dual GPU that notoriously reaches high temperatures. Whilst enthusiasts may well take the plunge and fit a new heatsink, most end users will balk at the idea. A better cooling solution offers a little more headroom for the overclocker, and would have been welcomed by the gaming community. A better cooler would have also dampened the noise levels as the fan struggles at keep things cool at high speeds.

We have already seen how well the Sapphire HD 4870X2 performed with its GPU running at 750Mhz, and the 2Gb of GDDR5 RAM steaming along at 900Mhz. The Asus, as you can see emblazoned on the box, has a default GPU speed of 790Mhz, with the RAM tweaked to 915Mhz. So we should expect more of the cutting edge performance running alongside high quality image reproduction we discovered from the Sapphire.

Okay, lets move on and look at the specifications.