| Visiontek Radeon HD 3870X2 Overclocked |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | |||||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 15 May 2008 07:59 | |||||||||||||||||||
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.
Specifications:
Onto benchmarks.
Here is our current test system.
Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with Nvidia's 175.12 of Forceware drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.4. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing.
In Crysis the 3870X2's performance is not bad, not great compared to the 9800 GTX but not bad.
While Unreal Tournament 3 was definitely not a hit but the game engine undoubtedly is so we feel it's important to test. Here we see some different results across the resolutions, at 1680x1050 the Visiontek 3870X2 OC is almost tied with two 9800 GTX cards in SLI, at 1920x1200 it dips a little even with two 9600 GT SLI cards and luckily it doesn't lose much at 2560x1600 able to handle the higher resolution while a single 9800 GTX card loses it's edge in a big way.
Quake Wars is one of the last Open GL games on the market and as always with Open GL games it favors Nvidia heavily. Again though the Visiontek card beats a single 9800 GTX at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.
Episode 2 isn't very demanding at even HD resolutions so we only tested at 2560x1600. Here the 3870X2 bests the 9800 GTX although comes short of two 9600GT cards in SLI.
3DMark is a synthetic benchmark but very popular to see hardware potential. Here we see the 3870X2 come in just under two 9800 GTX cards.
Conclusion: Overall the Visiontek 3870X2 Overclocked
Edition is a very cool card (figuratively, although it also
doesn't get exceptionally card). It fixes the past issues
with dual GPUs and offers a wallop of performance. However,
for the overclock you receive it is on the steep side of
things. It is $449 at
Newegg while the cheapest 3870X2 can be had for $329.99
which is a fairly large gap in price for the overclock. That
said again the cooling solution is quite good but it might
be good to drop a mail-in-rebate there or some price
cutting. Looking at the card's closest competitor in price
and performance, the 9800 GTX from Nvidia, we think the card
offers a great solution for those gaming at higher
resolutions. One market where ATI might look for a bigger
boost in selling graphics cards is Intel's chipset series
which still only support CrossFire technology and not SLI
unless you go for the incredibly expensive Skulltrail
platform. AMD might not have the fastest CPUs to push these
high-end cards but you can still find a home for them there
which should fit nicely. Score: 92%
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