HD3870 X2 versus HD3870 512MB Crossfire


Since the HD3870 X2 is essentially a pair of HD3870 cards with higher clock speeds and lower-speed GDDR3 memory, it is obvious that parallels will be drawn between the two. Since we had a pair of HD3870 512MB cards kicking around I decided to run a few quick tests.




The HD3870 X2 provides overall better performance than a pair of standard HD3870 cards in all of the games we benchmarked the two against one another. There isn’t too much of a difference between the two but it seems like having two chips on one card with a PLX bridge is a bit more efficient than having two cards on two slots connected by a Crossfire bridge. Even though the HD3870 X2 looks to be a bit more expensive than a pair of individual HD3870 512MB cards it has the benefit of using only one PCI-E slot and offering better overall performance.