NVIDIA's and AMD's graphics board partners usually take differing approaches when releasing factory overclocked variants of each company's respective high-end GPUs. When NVIDIA launches a new part for example, their board partners typically have factory overclocked versions at the ready, and at launch, it's sometimes easier to find overclocked cards than stock reference models. AMD's board partners, however, don't usually take the same approach. When AMD launches a new ATI Radeon, the first batch of cards to hit typically follow the reference design to the letter, and custom, factory overclocked models don't arrive until some time later.

That's what happened with the Radeon HD 4870 X2. At launch, just about every Radeon HD 4870 X2 available at retail had the exact same features and specifications. But more recently, a few board partners have introduced factory overclocked variants that take the performance of what is already the fastest graphics card available up a notch. We've actually got two of them in house, the Asus EAH4870X2 TOP and the MSI R4870X2-T2D2G-OC. Come on by the site and check them out.