The Radeon HD 4870 X2 R700 prototype card is out and definitely will beat the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 in 3DMark Vantage.

The R700 card is basically made up of two RV770 GPUs with 2x256-bit memory interface and will likely cater GDDR5 memories. We asked our sources about R700 in Computex and apparently AMD is going to let AIB partners to decide the specs themselves.

Board partners will set their own clock speeds, PCB design, memory types, cooler solutions etc. It seems there will be Radeon HD 4850 X2 and 4870 X2 cards differentiate by the memory type. The R700 card apparently doing pretty well at this stage scoring about X5500 in 3DMark Vantage Extreme preset while the GeForce GTX 280 card is scoring X4800. Both sides are still working hard on optimizing their drivers for the new architecture so probably we will see the performance to improve over time.

The black PCB of the HD 4870 X2 shows the RV770 couple, a PLX PCI-Express 2.0 bridge chip (look between the GPUs) and, front plus back, 1GB of Qimonda GDDR5 via 16 memory chips.

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be released in August.

photo's are courtesy of chiphell