Review: Single HD 4870 X2 vs. Two HD 4870s on P45

What do you get when you put a pair of Sapphire HD 4870s into a P45 board with many tests? Well read on to find out.

So, what we’re going to do today is chuck a pair of Sapphire HD 4870s into a P45 board and do a bunch of tests. We’re then going to pull those two cards out and stick in a single HD 4870 X2. We will run the same tests and proceed to compare. Since we’ve already looked at the cards themselves, we’re just going to get stuck straight into the benchmarking side of things. Let’s begin by taking a quick look at our testbed we’re using today, before getting stuck straight into the benchmarks.

A single HD 4870 X2 thrown into a heavily over-clocked P45 board is going to run like an absolute dream. 3.5GHz + isn’t really all that uncommon these days and here we really get to see the HD 4870 X2 shine, even more so than before.

Compared against the HD 4870 Crossfire solution on the P45 board, we see the HD 4870 X2 either performing similar, like we saw in our older P45 vs. X48 testing, or it manages to get a good 10% jump on the setup.

You would really have to be a bit on the side of crazy to purchase a pair of HD 4870s over a single HD 4870 X2 when looking for some real GPU power. We can see under intensive load situations, the lack of bandwidth going to the Crossfire configuration does have an impact on performance.

Before we finish off, though, let’s have a quick look at some of the results we obtained out of the Smooth Creation 3.9GHz system against our 3GHz testbed.

With the HD 4870 X2, we saw our Vantage performance score move up from 12496 to 14996.

Talking real world, World in Conflict performance is way up. 2560 x 1600 yields a minimum of 24 FPS and an average of 46 FPS on our 3.0GHz testbed. On the heavily overclocked Smooth Creations system, we saw the minimum move to a very important 32 FPS and the average sky rocket to an impressive 62 FPS.

This gives you a real idea of just how CPU bottle necked these cards are. All I can say is, “Bring on i7!”

Read the full 9-page hands-on review over on TweakTown

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