Preliminary testing showed that the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 offers comparable performance to an ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB dual card CrossFire solution, hence we're going to pit this overclocked XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX against a pseudo Radeon HD 4870 X2 card. Our overclock of 735/1575/1325 on the XFX card was stable, and we ran all the following tests at a single go on those clocks.

We opted to run the benchmarks at 1920 x 1200. This would be the resolution used on 23-inchers to 28-inchers, and cost of LCDs of such sizes fall within the means of most avid gamers, although some would have the dough or are willing to splurge on 30-inchers.

Overall, the overclocked GTX showed that it is still able to keep up from our quick test, except for a very glaring deficit of almost 40 frames in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The GTX 280 also has weaker performance over the CrossFired HD 4870 setup, although a single ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB is pretty evenly matched by, a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 896MB.