I really wish you fellows would have bothered with testing higher than 4xAA
in titles that support it.

It appears AMD has a master strategy:

Deliver a $449 dual gpu that slaughters everything below it, and a value $189 quad core that performs as well as Intels best in gaming at med & high resolutions. Total of the two is $638 which is about the cost of the 8800 ultra alone. INTC's cheapest quad is still $249.

Seems like AMD is delivering a value/performance combo, driving the competitions prices down.

I never knew Kyle had his own fanboi club.

Look at what Kyle at the Hard/OCP Wrote after his conclusion:

(Editor's Note: You will see here today that our evaluation of the gaming performance produced by this video card does not track with some other big sites on the Web, and the simple fact is that those sites did not measure "gaming performance." Those sites measured frames per second performance in canned benchmarks and even some of them went as far as to use cut scenes from games to pull their data from. I have been part of this industry for years now and we are seeing now more than ever where real world gaming performance and gaming "benchmarks" are not coming to the same conclusions. Remember that when we evaluate video cards, we use them exactly the way you would use them. We play games on them and collect our data.

Another thing to think about is this. Do game developers want to provide built in benchmarks that show their games running slow? Or would the game developers rather put a game "benchmark" in that shows their game hauling ass? Do you think that slow benchmarks equal more sales?

The "3dfx way" of evaluating video cards is DEAD. It did have its time and place, but we are beyond that now. Any person using those methods to influence your video card purchase is likely irresponsible in doing so. You might even consider them liable. And I think that is going to come bubbling to the surface more and more as the industry matures. )

Yawn, hardly impressive.

AMD's attempt at becoming a 7950GX2 just falls short.

It barely defeats the obsolete and aging 8800U (really a factory-overclocked 8800GTX), while the more affordable 8800GT is almost as fast.

The upcoming 8800GTx2 on a single-card is coming out to completely dethrone the 3870 X2 as fastest single-PCB graphics solution.

Excellent review; thanks Scott.
I can already see the posts to this review.

The lovers will say congrats and good job AMD for taking the crown back.
The haters will say it doesn't count cause its two GPUs. :)

Personally, I say good job AMD, and here is why:

1) I like the fact that this is the fastest single slot, non-chip set dependent video card around. Nice that I dont have to limit myself to anymore to get a DUAL GPUs runnin. I think the end result is all that matters.

2)Not only is it fast, but also supports DX10.1. We shall see down the road if it will ever matter or not, but still nice to have.

3) I wonder if the drivers will someone day allow one of the GPUs to handle physics while other does the graphics, cause I can see that happening.

"I have no idea how the Radeon HD 3870 is able to produce much more than double its vertex throughput in CrossFire than with a single GPU, but the voodoo magic seems to rub off on the X2, as well."

If I was to theorize, I would say they were made to function better in pairs then alone and actually cover holes for eachother, perhaps even have ways of teaming for processes. I don't know any techno details for it, but I'm sure thats where multi-gpu/cpus will eventually have to tread. Where they don't just double performance by 100%, but actually know that there is another processor there and shift the capabilities of another processor and use the other one as a real time buffer where the workloads are so off balanced.

What happens if this thing folds ?

the main annoyance today with benchmark testing is in the case of Kyle and Driverheaven and Xbit is they arbitrarily choose their own personal settings.

Kyle likes to flower it up that he's testing playable settings but in reality it's a mess and impossible to find any other website using the same settings.

Xbit is terrible for testing 4X AA at what used to be standard resolutions and leaving giant gaps, additionally Xbit is terrible for using outdated drivers and claiming their was no difference then they flood their tests with synthetic benchmarks that have me snoring after the 5th graph......

everyone at least seems to use the same testing platforms but generalise the damned settings or as is the case with TechReport be good enough to have a healthy pool of video cards to do direct comparisons with.... Xbit has been weak in this regard, HardOCP's benches and graphs are moderate at best...... I've walked away from his tests simply because it's a challenge just to make sense of them, sitting their picking settings between the cards tested to make sense of the review.

Ah yes.."Clever Kyle"....if you want to see how smart he and his testing ways are,check out his thoughts and conclusions about how the newly released Conroe C2D made little to no difference...he's an idiot.
It was a great GPU test tho......ugh.

Damn AMD did it. Took the crown from nvidia. AMD's X2 works better than any dual card solution. This solution is giving AMD 10-20% over crossfire. The benchmarks speaks for itself beating dual 3870 in most cases with slower clock speeds.

This card gets hot like the 8800GT. I've got one of the latter, and with an after-market cooler over the single gpu, it's running nice and cool, e.g., mid-50s while running crysis. I wonder what people will use for after-market cooling with this card given that it has 2 gpus.

The single most important thing to take out of that review is that AMD have fixed multi-monitor support for multi-GPU solutions.

Statistically, and demographically, none of of you reading this right now will ever buy this card, but some of you will probably have crossfire or SLI setups. Now that AMD have cracked multi-gpu/multi-display with this card, there is at least a hope that future and possibly existing dual-card crossfire setups will be given the same treatment.

Never knew that Ruby has blue eyes.
Would it be more sexy if she has green eyes?
But sadly green thing on graphics card has association with Nvidia.

Great article as always.

GJ AMD, congrats on finally winning something! Too bad the dual GPUs aren't seen as one. That would be a neat trick. Too bad it couldn't just be a single GPU.

Too bad it costs as much as a console and will be outdated in 1/4 the time.

As of 8:00PM Pacific Time, 6 variants of HD3870 X2 are listed on Newegg:-

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&De...

ALL at $449.

4 variants are currently available, 2 are already out-of-stock.

Newegg seems to only get trial quantities of new products when first released, so expect these to run out very quickly. The real test of availability from the manufacturers is the speed with which the items are re-stocked.

However, you might just want to hold on to your wallet tightly for a while. Whatever about AMD/ATi, nVidia is churning away at the next-gen development.

Also, please be aware that if a game is not ATi-profiled for the HD3870X2 dual-GPU configuration, the benefit of the second GPU is lost.

See this page of the Tom's Hardware review of the HD3870X2:-

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/01/28/ati_r680_the_rage_fury_maxx_...

There is no real replacement for a monolithic GPU implementation. SLI or Crossfire, whether implemented dual-card or single-card dual-GPU is always a limited-functionality substitute, requiring application-configuration updates and dual-GPU driver tweaks by the GPU manufacturers. Support of previous incarnations of dual-GPU "cards" tend to get forgotten very quickly once the next generation GPUs are on hand. The next gen single-GPUs in the same price-range as the dual-GPUs of a previous generation always exceed the previous generation in both performance and significantly-enhanced capability. Compare for example the 7950GX2 and the 8800GTX.

One important reason, aside of the increased gpu frequency, is the PLX' ability to do 'peer-to-peer' writes that makes this solution faster. This essentially means the two RV670 chips can talk to eachother without going through the chipset.
I just wonder how much more performance they could've had if they would have used a PCIE 2.0 switch. nVidia's NF200 PCIE switch also supports PtP but also PCIE 2.0 ... I wonder if it will matter much.
Concerning the sound level: i find it just too loud. I've heard an 2900XT and that's just too loud. Luckily GeCube and Asus will have models with different and hopefully more silent cooling. The GeCube looks promising since it's using two ZEROtherm GX810's. I guess using two Zalman VF900's will also be possible.

http://www.overclockers.ru/hardnews/28051.shtml

I'm actually quite impressed by the CF/SLi scaling in these tests. In the past it was common to see a rig with only one video perform slightly BETTER than having two of the same card. So finally it's "safe" to go multi-gpu again… for now.

I would still buy a 8800 series card..

looks like a giant heart pump!

Great news. Hope AMD can take crowns more often and keep them longer.

despite its flaws.. the thing that makes this unlike previous super-crazy-high-end cards are that the price is reasonable.

They arent asking $600 for this.

I could almost overlook the noise and power usage for the price.. hmm.
Only problem is.. I want a card that can play Crysis at 1920x1200.

Its nice to see that all the early "benchmarks" were wrong.. and ATI seems to be fairly consistent across the board at bettering the 3870 & GTS 512 across the board. significantly in some cases. Crysis seems to be the weak point.

pretty good card for what it is. if it works that well with most games, I think AMD has a winner here.

you can talk about what's coming out next week all you want, i'll address that when it gets here and if it's available.

Good for AMD. Its good to see some competition again! This will cause faster technonlogy advances(more GPU releases) and lower prices.

Lack of competition for the top spot is why Nvidia never released a 8900.
:(

i'm sure Nvidia will retaliate with extreme force now though.

Radeon HD 3870 X2 w/1gig ddr3 memory ready to be released and tested in France. Question is, why not using ddr4 memory instead? I found this link:
matbe.com
I used altavista babel fish to translate.

This is showing some decent Crossfire efficiency, but you still have RV670's general deficiencies compared to G92-112. I like that idle power management for sure.

It looks like 8800U's 768MB comes into play at the crazy high resolutions, meaning that 512MB could be nearing the end of its "idealness" at lower resolutions too.

Just noticed this review is using an older set of the drivers. When TechReport's site was down earlier this morning, I went over to Anandtech to read their review. They specifically mentioned that this card was delayed a week for AMD to fix a bunch of issues in the driver.

According to TR's sys config: they used the older driver: "with 8.451.2-080116a-057935E drivers"

According to Anandtech, they used the newer driver: "ATI: 8-451-2-080123a"

The changes in the newer driver are quoted from Anandtech:
<<
• Company of Heroes DX10 – AA now working on R680. Up to 70% faster at 2560x1600 4xAA
• Crysis DX10 – Improves up to ~60% on R680 and up to ~9% on RV670 on Island GPU test up to 1920x1200.
• Lost Planet DX10 – 16xAF scores on R680 improved ~20% and more. AF scores were horribly low before and should have been very close to no AF scores
• Oblivion – fixed random texture flashing
• COJ – no longer randomly goes to blackscreen after the DX10 benchmark run
• World in Conflict - 2560x1600x32 0xAA 16xAF quality=high we get 77% increase
• Fixed random WIC random crashing to desktop
• Fixed CF scaling for Colin McRae Dirt, Tiger Woods 08, and Blazing Angels2
• Fixed WIC DX9 having smearable text
>>

I'll bet the copper cooler on the second GPU is needed because the air blowing over it is already pretty hot from cooling the first GPU. The copper boosts the efficiency of the second cooler enough that it can still do its job...

Maybe too little, too late.

The next-gen high-end GPU from nVidia is in full development and will be on retail shelves by mid-2008. And there may also be a 8800GT dual-GPU variant any day now. Like the 7950GX2, the HD3870X2 (and any dual-8800 GPU card) will have a very short shelf life, to be instantly replaced by a single-GPU of the next generation, and with superior performance. Certainly this release might help milk more sales of RV670 GPUs. AMD is crimped for cash for next-gen silicon development, so the more that they can milk from variants of current technology, the better for their short-term bottom-line. Hopefully, AMD can break the mold of their recent product shipments and have a hard-release of the HD3870X2 with no product shortages. The opportunity-time for the HD3870X2 is likely to be very narrow indeed.

I had read the HardOCP review before this one (for once).
Their reviews are ... different and somewhat limited. (e.g. only a few games tested, but then those are heavily tested for game play)
I noticed that they had strongly suggested (especially in the comments for that article) that the canned benchmarks showed a major difference from actual game play with this card. Assuming their results are correct (I would expect so), then that seems to point to something that appears to heavily bottlenecking the HD3870X2 that isn't apparent in standard benchmark tests.
Perhaps they are looking at minimum usable performance, maybe it is heavy firefights or something similar that has such a major impact.
Taking a look where they noticed major performance hits for the HD3870X2, should that be something that is verified to see if there is a real issue with the HD3870X2?