ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB Coverage - Part Two

“Without a doubt, the ATI HD3870 X2 is a good card but at the same time, it lives and dies by driver and in-game Crossfire support. There are quite a few new and old games out there that do not support Crossfire and ATI’s driver team faces a monumental task of optimizing this dual-GPU card for those situations and as we have seen, they are making great headway. That being said, even though the card we reviewed here today was an early engineering sample, the potential of ATI’s new flagship card is simply mind blowing. It feels good to finally be able to say it: ATI has a flagship card. Against all odds, they have crammed two GPU cores on a single PCB the same length as an 8800GTX and its performance is nearly flawless. The HD3870 X2 can fight toe-to-toe with the best Nvidia currently has to offer and in many cases, it beats everything else hands down. At many points, this card shows its brilliance by outpacing even the mighty 8800GTX by a good 20% but at other times, performance falls short of our expectations.”

“The Radeon HD 3870 X2 proved to be a strong performer throughout our testing. In most of the games we tested, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 was usually the highest performing single-card in the group. It loses some benchmarks to a dual-card Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire setup, and wins others. The same can be said of the Radeon HD 3870 X2 in comparison to the GeForce 8800 GTX. The 8800 GTX was the better performer in Company of Heroes, and at a couple of resolution is Crysis. But the X2 pulls ahead in HL2: EP2 and ET: Quake Wars. The Radeon HD 3870 X2’s video playback performance was also quite good.”

“The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 is obviously aimed at the enthusiast market and it does very well compared to other ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 looks great on DirectX 10 game titles and holds it own against the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which is a card that costs nearly $200 more at $630. For just $450 the Radeon HD 3870 X2 finally forces NVIDIA to compete in the high-end video card market, so it should be safe to say that NVIDIA has some new products on the way and possible price cuts on cards that have been in the market for some time now. It took ATI years to catch up to the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 Ultra and while they didn't catch up with a single GPU solution they did develop a mutli-GPU solution that can. When it comes to ease of use the Radeon HD 3870 X2 was easier to use than pair of Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards in CrossFire as nothing need to be done.”

“GECUBE have done what will probably be the best HD 3870 X2 money can buy! Is it the best video card on the market at the moment? - Well, it’s kind of hard to say. I’m quite a fan of the X2 and with the potential of Crossfire just around the corner the chances are if you’re after some serious power you couldn’t pass on two of these bad boys.”