Review: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 - AMD's back - Channel - HEXUS.net

Final thoughts

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 is, on balance, the fastest graphics-card in our line-up. Given just how it achieves its lofty performance - literally adding two Radeon HD 3870 GPUs on to one PCB - the result isn't surprising, so if you can't win the straight-line speed battle with a single GPU, just add another.

We've made frequent allusions to just how well-rounded the current HD 3870 is and the X2's results are generally on a par with a couple of those boards in CrossFire and that's what we'd expect. It carries over the cornucopia of 2D-related features, too.

The inherent downside into running multiple GPUs on one board lies with just how well the driver is able to scale performance, and our Splinter Cell HDR test shows that, sometimes, you don't receive the hoped-for 1.5x+ speed-up.

Is it worth the £279 or so? The answer is a tentative yes, because it achieves top-dog status, in our set of benchmarks at least, from brute power rather than the elegant and well funded developer-relation support that NVIDIA currently enjoys.

We'll compare its performance to a GeForce Ultra as we look at a retail board later on today, but until then, the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 looks good for users wanting ultimate performance from a single card.

Further exploration of the Ultra's performance and, say, GeForce 8800 GT SLI will be needed before we can declare it both the ultimate and performance-to-price champion, though.

HEXUS.certification

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 passed all of our tests without failure.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

HEXUS Awards

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

This is an edited version of the review on HEXUS.net. You can read it in full here.

HEXUS Where2Buy

HEXUS is advised that the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 will be available to purchase today from SCAN, eBuyer, Microdirect and other reputable e-tailers.

Yoyotech currently lists a Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 1024MiB for £297 here.

eBuyer currently lists the same card, on pre-order, for £280 here.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any the AMD's representatives choose to do so, we'll publish their responses here verbatim.