We've managed to confirm that XFX will join the ATI camp at the start of the new year. XFX won't drop Nvidia products, either, but obviously, Nvidia won't be thrilled by this turn of events. There's been a lot of talk of Nvidia partner defections and reshuffles in recent months, and some have already gone red. XFX is just following the trend and leaving Nvidia in a rather awkward situation of having just a single powerful Nvidia exclusive partner - EVGA.

HEXUS can confirm that one of NVIDIA's strongest AIB supporters, XFX, will be signed up as an ATI (AMD) card partner in the very near future. What that means is that XFX, with its glitzy marketing and XXX Edition cards, will be bringing all this marketing know-how to ATI's GPUs - presumably encompassing the entire line-up of 2-, 3-, and 4-series SKUs.

Sapphire is preparing the fastest card in its Atomic series, the Atomic HD 4870 X2. The new Atomic card will be water-cooled and comes with integrated system that will cool both graphics card and the CPU. Due to water-cooling, the new Atomic HD 4870 X2 will be factory overclocked to 800MHz for the cores and 1000MHz for 2GB of GDDR5 memory, 1GB for each GPU. The cooling system looks like, and probably is, Asetek's LCLC water-cooling solution and it cools the graphics card as well as the CPU. The radiator includes a 120mm, 7-blade, blue LED fan that gives up to 60CFM of airflow at full speed.