The box of the card is a red version of their standard box with the frog warrior gracing the cover. Logos for the ATI Radeon graphics, CrossfireX, HDCP, and basic information of the card are on the front. One thing to note that due to the power requirements of two HD 4870 X2 cards, a 650W power supply is required for the card. Of course, to reach this level of performance on the NVIDIA side would require two GTX260 cards which would offer equivalent performance but require even more power as that is four 6-pin power connectors on the card.

Palit sent this card in a barebone bundle with the box and an installation guide. Due to the time constraints of a launch this is normal. Palit bundles normally come with the requisite cables and connections to fully utilize the video card. One bonus that Palit cards come with such as the HD4870 and GeForce GTX 280 is the new game Tomb Raider Anniversary, which is the updated version of the classic Tomb Raider game released many moons ago by Eidos.

ATI has been on a driver releasing spree since Terry Makedon took over their driver team a few years back. I first met Terry at the Radeon 9700 Pro launch in 2002 at San Francisco. ATI has been releasing twelve drivers a year and today are on driver version 8.7. Due to the card not being released yet ATI sent driver version 8.52 with the card which is equivalent to 8.7 and was used during testing of the HD 4870 X2.

Overclocking of the card is an interesting experience. ATI includes a version of their Overdrive utility with their drivers that automatically overclock the card. The HD 4870 X2 card overclocked to 790MHz core/990MHz memory with Overdrive. The card was completely stable at those clock speeds, however, the card showed artifacts after setting the settings back to default. This is due to the fact that default settings had to be reset on each chip on the card, meaning one chip was at 790/990 while the other was at 750/900 the default clock speeds.

Drivers