SAPPHIRE Technology is introducing the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 4870 X2, an exclusive new dual GPU water cooled version of the standard ATI HD 4870 X2 card.

As usual, the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 4870 X2 comprises of two complete HD 4870 graphics systems on a single PCI-Express card connected by an on-board PCI Express Gen 2 bridge chip. Each GPU has 1GB of GDDR5 memory, making a total of 2GB on-board memory. Core clock speed for this model is 800MHz, there are 2×800 stream processors, the memory clock speed is 1000MHz with 512-bit memory interface. What’s so special in this model is the full cover liquid cooling provided by the famous OEM cooling expert Asetek. The water-block cools both GPUs, all memory chips, the bridge chip and all the power elements. Two Dual Link DVI outputs are provided as well as TV-Out. Additionally the card’s bundle includes a CCL UV lamp and Sapphire USB memory stick with drivers.

According to sources, this card will see light of the day from December 18th for a prise of $649.

GIGABYTE has launched their in-house designed GV-R487D5-1GD graphics card which is built on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 GPU and features 1GB/256-bit high-speed GDDR5 video memory. The new graphics card also features a native DisplayPort connectivity, TeraScale graphics engine, ATI CrossFireX support, Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2), and ATI PowerPlay power management technology. 
 
Faster clocks, double the transistor density of earlier 65 nm technology. 55nm technology helped make HD4870 series products the most advanced GPUs ever highest clocks speeds, incredible feature integration, full performance and precision all the time, and ability to take advantage of future, higher-speed memories.
 
ATI Avivo HD continues to provide brilliant colors, sharp images, smooth playback of Blu-ray™ and HD DVD content, and now adds enhanced connectivity through DisplayPort™, HDMI with built-in multi-channel digital audio, and on some GPUs, Unified Video Decoding (UVD). UVD is designed to enable a cool and quiet media PC with low GPU and CPU power requirements and playback of full HD 1080p content.

  
The power of DirectX® 10.1 with awesome performance, stunning visual effects, and more dynamic interactivity than ever before.Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX® 10.1 applications. Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 games, with stunning 3D graphics and shading effects.
 
Shader Model 4.1 adds support for indexed temporaries which can be quite useful for certain tasks.Regular direct temporary access is preferable is most cases. One reason is that indexed temporaries are hard to optimize. The shader optimizer may not be able to identify optimizations across indexed accesses that could otherwise have been detected. Furthermore, indexed temporaries tend to increase register pressure a lot. An ordinary shader that contains for instance a few dozen variables will seldom consume a few dozen temporaries in the end but is likely to be optimized down to a handful depending on what the shader does. This is because the shader optimizer can easily track all variables and reuse registers. This is typically not possible for indexed temporaries, thus the register pressure of the shader may increase dramatically. This could be detrimental to performance as it reduces the hardware’s ability to hide latencies.

Ensure top-notch compatibility and performance for all OpenGL 2.1 application. Upgrade to even greater 3D performance quickly and easily thanks to plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology. Now you are ready for the most demanding graphics applications thanks to PCI Express® 2.0 support, which allows up to twice the throughput of current PCI Express® cards. Doubles the bus standard’s bandwidth from 2.5 Gbit/s (PCIe 1.1) to 5 Gbit/sec. 
 
As a citizen of the global village, GIGABYTE exert ourselves to be a pioneer in environment care. Give the whole of Earth a promis that our products do not contain any of the restricted substances in concentrations and applications banned by the RoHS Directive, and are capable of being worked on at the higher temperatures required for lead free solder. One Earth and GIGABYTE Cares!
 
The GIGABYTE GV-R487D5-1GD features ATI TeraScale graphics engine, boasting teraFLOPS of GPU computing power with 800 stream processors and nearly one billion transistors, claims the company. Equipped with 1GB GDDR5 memory, the GV-R487D5-1GD is able to deliver nearly two times the memory bandwidth of the previous generation.

In combination with 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering, the GV-R487D5-1GD is able to create true-to-life graphics effects for everything from grass to facial features, says the company. The GIGABYTE GV-R4870 also provides DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities with support for Shader Model 4.1, to further enhance 3D gaming effects.

The GV-R487D5-1GD fully supports UVD 2 for decoding processing-intensive content for 1080p HDTV and HD video, with additional support for dynamic contrast and enhanced DVD upscaling. The card takes full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture-in-picture (PIP) capabilities and one-cable HDMI connectivity.

To help reduce PC power consumption, the GV-R487D5-1GD features the GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 2 design.