How we tested
Hardware
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 X2 1024MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2 1024MiB | Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 512MiB | MSI NX8800GTS-T2D512E-OC | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MiB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current pricing, including VAT | £329 | £269 | £125 | £199 | £225 | £399 | |
| Shader Model | 4.1 | 4.0 | |||||
| Stream processors | 640 | 640 | 320 | 128 | 128 | 128 | |
| GPU clock speed (MHz) | 878 | 825 | 777 | 678 | 576 | 612 | |
| Shader clock speed (MHz) | 878 | 825 | 777 | 1,728 | 1,350 | 1,512 | |
| Memory clock speed (MHz) | 1,910 | 1,802 | 2,250 | 1,944 | 1,800 | 2,160 | |
| Memory bus width (Bits) | 256 | 384 | |||||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 LGA775 (3.0GHz, 8MiB L2 cache, quad-core) | ||||||
| Motherboard | MSI X48 Platinum (X48+ICH9R) | eVGA NF68 (nForce 680i SLI) | |||||
| Motherboard BIOS | P2B2 | P31 | |||||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf 8.4.0.1016 | NVIDIA device driver 15.08 | |||||
| Graphics drivers | CATALYST 8.2 BETA5 | CATALYST 7.12 | ForceWare 169.25 | ||||
| Memory | 4GiB (4 x 1GiB) DDR3-1066 | 4GiB (4 x 1GiB) DDR2-1066 | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 7-7-7-20 2T @ 1,066MHz | 5-5-5-15 2T @ 1,066MHz | |||||
| PSU | Enermax Galaxy DXX 850W | Gigabyte ODIN GT 800W | |||||
| Monitor | Dell 3007WFP | ||||||
| 3D Benchmarks | Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts v2.103: DX9 Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.2 (demo_00010.dem, map Valley) Lost Planet: Extreme Condition v1.004 built-in benchmark: DX10 |
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Notes
We've run our three games with the in-game settings fixed at high/very high and at suitably card-taxing resolutions, with antialiasing/anisotropic filtering applied. We'll note any testing anomalies during benchmark commentary, of course.Pricing of the Sapphire watercooled card still has to be finalised. We've run it against five other high-performance cards to see exactly where it stands in comparison. Bear in mind that we've tested it with 878/1,910MHz frequencies.
