Dual GPUs together on a single card haven't always been smooth sailing in the past. Hot, power hungry, incompatible with SLI at times and more annoying than helpful at times. That all changed though when ATI released a new type of dual GPU card with the Radeon HD 3870X2 which combined two cards onto one PCB and solved many of the issues from the past. We've taken a look at ATI's card previously and now we have an overclocked version to look at with Visiontek's Radeon HD 3870X2 Overclocked Edition.

The card comes packaged in a rectangular box which is just the right size for a card this large, meaning not unnecessarily big. Rectangular in shape it features Call of Juarez on the box although we didn't see it in our bundle. Inside the card is packed nicely in Styrofoam with a fairly typical hardware bundle. DVI-to-VGA adapter, DVI-to-HDMI adapter, molex to PCI-Express power adapter, HDTV cable, and S-video cable. No extra software bundle is included.

Taking the card out of the box it is pretty heavy though not as large a card as the GeForce 9800 GTX. Visiontek have upped the ante with the overclocked card by putting a huge copper heatsink over the entire card with heatpipes and two large fans on both GPUs also enshrouded in copper heatsinks. Very meaty cooling solution. Thanks to all of this extra cooling the card is overclocked out of the box to 840MHz core clock speed and memory at 960MHz. This is 15MHz more than the standard core speed of a 3870X2 and 60MHz more for the memory.

The 3870X2 requires two PCI-Express 6-pin connectors which is actually better than the single 2900XT graphics card. Not only that but it features an amazing four DVI-Outputs so you should be more than covered for many spare monitors.

Once again we'll do a quick refresh of the RV670 GPU the cards are based on. Basically it they shrunk the die size of the 2900XT from 80nm to 55nm which got ride of the major problems of heat and power consumption. Additionally the memory bus was cut down from 512-bit to 256-bit with no performance penalty and in fact increased performance. 320 stream processors are still onboard and an upgrade is also there with the UVD (Universal Video Decoder) for your HD decoding, CPU offloading, pleasure. And let's not forget DirectX 10.1 support which Nvidia has yet to release a card which supports the next iteration of DX.