Asus EAH4870X2 TOP

At the time of going to press Asus’ 4870X2 series consisted of two cards; the EAH4870X2 and EAH4870X2 TOP. Our test sample is the former and the ‘TOP’ lettering signifies that, like XFX’s XXX Edition cards, this card is also pre-overclocked at the factory.

In this case, Asus has clocked each of this board’s GPUs at 790MHz whilst the 2Gbytes of GDDR5 memory runs at 3.66GHz. Standard cards run at frequencies of 750MHz and 3.6GHz respectively. Beyond the added clock muscle, the EAH4870X2 TOP offers all the standard features including HDMI interface compatibility and DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support.

The extra muscle made the TOP a potent performer when we ran it through our benchmarking gauntlet; it returned the highest framerates we’ve ever recorded for a single card in all of our benchmarks. So, if you aren’t interested in investing in a CrossFire X or SLI multi-GPU system, this is an ideal single card purchase.

The standard clocked 4870 GPUs produce a lot of heat and given that the Asus has two overclocked GPUs and memory that is also running above standard specification, the TOP runs quite warm under load. This causes the cooling fan to run at higher speeds to keep things under control and unfortunately, is audible in a quiet room. That said, there’s not much Asus can do short of slapping on an oversized cooler until AMD starts producing these GPUs using a new, more efficient manufacturing process than the current 55nm.