Related Articles

Box'n'bundle

The eye-catching Palit HD4870X2 box is red and shiny. The "HD4870X2" designation is fairly small, and the box is not over-sized. Frobot, the Palit cyber-super frog, adorns the front the box. Opposed to early imagings of Frobot, this time he is looking much serious, and somewhat chagrined, as if he recently barely escaped the clutches of some mad chef in from some kitchen in the French Riviera.

The Palit bundle is complete, if unsurprising. Though we did not recieve the bundle, as this was an early sample of the video card, we have been told by a Palit representative that it includes the following: the requisite manual and driver CD, a CrossFireX bridge, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, a HDTV component adapter, and a 8-pin - 6-pin power cable. A fine bundle.

One more thing to keep in mind: again because this is an earlier sample, the Palit HD4870X2 that you'll be able to get at your local stores will have this slightly different appearance (picture taken from a press release):

Besides the sticker though, there should not be any difference with the actual card, as the entire first wave of HD4870X2 video cards will all be of the reference design.

Overclocking

The HD4870X2 should be fast enough for everybody -- but of course faster is always better, so we tried our hand at overclocking the card.

Using the Catalyst Control Center, we had no problems pushing the core clock to the maximum overclock allowed by this program, which is 800 MHz -- 50 MHz over the default clocks. As for the memory, it was not up to the same challenge. By default, the memory is set to 900 MHz. We ran into problems at 955 MHz -- at this point and above, we would not get any blue screens of death, or any hard crashes, but a few games did get a bit garbled in our stability testing. That is to say, they were pretty much unplayable.

But with +50 MHz on the core, and +50 MHz on the memory, things ran fine, and this overclock isn't that shabby at all. With superior cooling -- especially with a decent fan put on the underside cooling plate -- adventurous overclockers will probably be able to push this card further (more so the core clock though, than the memory.)