nThe guys over at Chiphell have managed to snap a couple of photos of ATI’s R700 dual GPU card. It turns out that it really has a black PCB just like NVIDIA’s flagship GTX 280 cards. I don’t think that detail Is relevant for the time being. Instead, let’s take a closer look at these pictures and see if we can spot some new stuff.

Fudzilla points out that AMD/ATI still haven't finished the work on an in-house PCIe switch, as we can still see a PLX solution. However, the PLX chip seems to be a newer of the one found on the Radeon HD 3870 X2, and we can clearly see that the new chip is physically smaller than the previous version.

Furthermore, Fudzilla notes that the 4870X2 card is using a pair of digital PWM (Pulse-width modulation), one for each of the GPUs. The god thing about this new design is that PWMs take up a lot less PCB space than the analog PWM design of the Radeon HD 3870 X2.

One awkward feature seems to be the unangled power connectors. Then again, this might be just a prototype reference card and things could be changed by launch time. Still, we now know for sure that this card uses one six-pin and one eight-pin power connector.

On the connector side, we can identify a pair of DVI connectors and a TV-out connector, but I hope ATI will seriously consider the inclusion of HDMI or DisplayPort connectors, leaving the GPU integrators to decide prices for their cards according to the variety of features and connectors on their cards.