The ATI Radeon 4870 X2 is effectively two 4870 standalone cards strapped together
We're not big fans of multi-GPU graphics technology here on ye olde TechRadar. Whether you're talking SLI from NVIDIA or AMD's Crossfire, multi-GPU graphics solutions promise much but typically conspire to disappoint.
While they're often the most powerful cards on the market, driver support has left a lot to be desired. And so just when you're booting up Crysis in Extra Extreme Double Ultimate mode, it'll crash your machine and leave you to reboot.
If NVIDIA or ATI could solve this driver support problem, they'd sell a lot more of their dual-GPU cards.
The ATI Radeon 4870 X2 (formerly known as R700) then, has a lot of potential. The 4870 standalone card is the second most powerful single-GPU card on the market - and so this dual card is by far the most potent card out there.
It's got a theoretical maximum compute performance of 2.4TFLOPs. That's the same as the fastest supercomputer in the world from as recently as 1999.
So, has ATI provided us with a beasty card and the drivers to support it amply?