ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 1GB Review

Drivers and Catalyst Control for the HD3870 X2

Within the last few week, this card has had more driver revisions than you can shake a stick at but what I can say is this: the 8.1 drivers may be compatible with the HD3870 X2 but they are far from the best performing. One of my major issues with this whole process is that the release candidate and beta drivers reviewers and board partners have access to are not available to the public. Unfortunately, this means you the reader will have to wait God knows how long until you can move away from the drivers you get on the retail card’s driver CD which are probably five or more revisions older than what reviewers are working with. The screenshots below are from the 8.451.2-080 driver package we received from our contacts. It should be noted that this driver package (even though it has a lower number) is newer than the 8.452-series RC drivers and the 8.531 drivers which should be released with the retail cards. Go figure…

On the plus side, with the newest driver revision under our belts, you are better able to determine what this card is REALLY capable of.


Here we are in the standard Catalyst Control Menu under the Overdrive tab. In the 8.1 drivers dual HD3870 cards in Crossfire come up as separate cards under the Graphics Adaptor tab but with the HD3870 X2, it shows up as a single card. On the other hand, the "Select GPU to Configure" tab still shows a pair of cards which means that overclocking this card will be a pain in the butt and this bore true in our tests. We will discuss more about the intricacies of overclocking this card in another section.

Other than this, all of the options within the Catalyst Control Center are exactly the same as with other versions. You should remember however than these new drivers seem to take ages to install so please be patient and don’t panic when your screen goes black for a few minutes.


The Windows Vista device manager also picks up the HD3870 X2 as two separate graphics cards instead of just one. This isn’t a surprise since the PLX chip we saw earlier acts like an internal Crossfire bridge.