On Wednesday, we wrote that we’d published reviews of two high-end PC graphics cards: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295, and what we thought at the time was the Asus EAHD4870X2 TOP, an overclocked card using ATI’s Radeon HD 4870X2 dual-chip design. We learned Thursday morning that the Asus card we thought we had is actually something else.
As found on the Asus Web site, here is a picture of the standard clocked edition of its $479 EAHD4870X2 graphics card:
(Credit: Asus)Also on that same site, a picture of the $550 overclocked version:
(Credit: Asus)Finally, here’s what showed up in our lab:
(Credit: CNET)Turns out, despite all outward appearances, the card we received was not, in fact, overclocked. Instead, it’s the standard edition, at 750MHz clock speed per core. AMD says it sent us the Asus-branded, ready-for-retail packaged version, but we’re unclear as to why the fan and heatsink assembly is so different than what Asus has on display. If you’ve purchased the standard clocked edition yourself, we’d be interested to know what came in your box.
The reviews (Asus now here, competing GeForce GTX 295 here) have since been corrected, although our assessment stays the same. We still recommend the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 card over the Asus card, or any other with ATI’s Radeon HD4870 X2 design. The standard version may be $479, down from the $550 overclocked model, but it’s still slower and more power-hungry than the GTX 295, which costs just $20 more. You can also bet we’ll be running GPU-Z on all 3D cards from here on to confirm their clock speeds.
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