ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 1GB Review

Heat & Acoustical Performance


Overall, I was quite surprised at the stock heatsink’s ability to cool down both cores while maintaining relatively quiet operation. 86°C on one core and 81°C is quite good considering this engineering sample had a bit of a bastardized heatsink design with two different materials used for the GPU contact plates. On the other hand, I would suggest letting the card cool down before you remove it from your case since the backplate affixed to the underside gets burning hot.

At first I was worried about the fan making the same racket as the leaf-blower type affair used on the HD2900XT but I am happy to report the fan stayed quite silent through many of the tests. There were some instances where the fan sped up but even then it stayed at a volume which was acceptable to me. Just remember; I can only report about what I experienced and you may or may not find the fan on this card loud since these acoustical tests are only subjective.


Power Consumption

This test will be done a bit different from the last power consumption tests we have conducted. In this case Company of Heroes is now used with AA enabled to put less strain on the CPU so it will not impact as much on the results.

Please remember that this is the power consumption for the WHOLE SYSTEM.


While I was expecting the 55nm cores to do some good, it seems like this engineering sample consumes copious amounts of power. While this could be due to the nature of the early version of the card we had, if it carries over into the retail cards, you will need at least a quality 600W power supply for a single card and a quality 850W or higher power supply for two of these cards. While it may have not made much of a difference, I would be very interested to see what power consumption would have been if the GDDR3 had been switched out for GDDR4 modules. However, it should be mentioned that there are TWO cores on this card as well as a whole gig of memory it is understandable why the power consumption is so high. Actually, when you look at it that way, the power needs of the HD3870 X2 are well within reason.