Mountain House (CA) - The first batch of R700 previews hit the Internet today as AMD lifted the news embargo for a very limited number of hardware review websites. Some of the spurned sites, like Guru of 3D (Guru3D.com), were furious and made their emotions public.

In fact, Guru of 3D was so furious in regards to AMD that they published the launch date for the product. We know that R700 line-up will consist out of two graphics cards, one cheaper and one more expensive one. Look for Radeon 4850 X2 1GB and 4870 X2 2GB in your favorite retail/e-tail store on August 13.

"The expensive one" was previewed on AnandTech, HardOCP, Tech Report and so on.

As you can see for yourself, ATI Radeon 4870 X2 even with beta BIOS and drivers has a lot of potential. ATI increased the CrossFire bandwidth from 6 to 20 GB/s, while PCIe bridge chip was moved from Gen1 to Gen2 (PEX8547 chip was replaced with PEX8647/8), even though this increased latency from 110ns to 140ns.

We were worried about continuous PLX’s PCI Express bridge chips, since 3870 X2 suffered from microstuttering, a problem with multi-gpu solutions rendering frames at different times resulting in long delay between two frames.

Even though PLX864x chip features increased latency, Sampsa Kurri at Xtremesystems.org reported that ATI finally fixed microstuttering with 4870 X2. With this issue gone, it seems that AMD finally has a winner on their hands.