ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 1GB Review

Conclusion

Without a doubt, the ATI HD3870 X2 is a good card but at the same time, it lives and dies by driver and in-game Crossfire support. There are quite a few new and old games out there that do not support Crossfire and ATI’s driver team faces a monumental task of optimizing this dual-GPU card for those situations and as we have seen, they are making great headway. That being said, even though the card we reviewed here today was an early engineering sample, the potential of ATI’s new flagship card is simply mind blowing. It feels good to finally be able to say it: ATI has a flagship card. Against all odds, they have crammed two GPU cores on a single PCB the same length as an 8800GTX and its performance is nearly flawless. The HD3870 X2 can fight toe-to-toe with the best Nvidia currently has to offer and in many cases, it beats everything else hands down. At many points, this card shows its brilliance by outpacing even the mighty 8800GTX by a good 20% but at other times, performance falls short of our expectations.

With the 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra set to make their departure from the market in a few weeks time, ATI has positioned itself perfectly to take advantage of the vacuum created in the high-end category. As it stands, the HD3780 X2 is at the very top of the performance heap more often than not and until Nvidia comes up with an answer to it, it will continue to reign supreme. Like we saw in the progression of this review as its drivers rapidly mature, things will get even better performance-wise.

Then there is the question of price. From where I am standing, it looks like the HD3870 X2 will retail for about $500CAD (and higher) at many retailers. Personally, I think this is a great value for your money considering the performance we have seen with this card. This price puts it about $20 more expensive than buying two separate HD3870 512MB cards and running them in Crossfire. Considering we have seen that the HD3870 X2 offers higher performance than two separate cards and has the added convenience of using one PCI-E slot, I think this is a win-win situation.

However, with all this praise come a few words of warning. Like with all good things, there are still some areas in which improvements have to be made but this is usually the story with any freshly released card. The DX10 performance in World in Conflict stands out quite glaringly as one area that needs improvement while the always-suffering ATI scores in Lost Planet continue with this card as well. These are all things that should be easily fixed with upcoming driver revisions but the power consumption is something that consumers should watch out for. If you think your 500W power supply will tango with one of these cards, you are sadly mistaken and you should go out and buy a fittingly high powered unit instead.

Finally, mention really has to be made about the overclocking potential of our sample; to put it delicately, it was pathetic. Enthusiasts want to see good amounts of overclocking headroom if their spend $500 on a graphics card and the amount of headroom this card has will not make any perceivable difference in games or synthetic benchmarks. Whether this will change in the retail cards is not yet known but all indications point towards disappointing overclocking potential for the first run of HD3870 X2 cards. We hope to get our hands on a retail HD3870 X2 soon to compare the performance and overclocking difference between it and this engineering sample so stay tuned for that one.

After seeing ATI fight an uphill battle for the better part of a year, many a naysayer was counting the days until the company rolled over and died. Thankfully it looks like under the tutelage of AMD, ATI is back in the game and we can see that there are some very exciting times ahead in the graphics card industry.


Pros:

- Heart-stopping performance
- Price
- HDMI dongle

Cons:

- Sometimes driver optimizations go AWOL
- Fan spins up quite quickly
- Overclocking? What overclocking?