AMD Launches ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

Very nice, If the price is right.. I might just pick this one up. 

I appreciate the HH Review. Between Anandtech and Kyle over at Hardocp flaming about which review method is better It makes me all more appreciative for the HH reviews. I think Kyle has a point in some ways about caned benchmarks but I think its a easy work around by creating your own timedemos, like you guys did with quake wars. The subjective review is just too dependant on the person and not the actual data and you cant repeat it exactly accross the system.

Pretty terrible review. How about doing a proper comparison of the cards? It was good showing the performance of the 3700 series and Crossfire mode to the X2 card... but why only show the nVidia single card scores? It'd be a better comparison to put the SLI scores in there. Take the 8800GTX and the 8800GT 512MB in SLI mode as a comparison... as I highly doubt that the X2 comes close to either one in scores.

Hi All

I agree with you Flyin. I think that HotHardware's approach to benchmarking is the right way to go. The creation of their own time demo addresses the canned benchmark concern, while at the same time giving you a real world experience.

sniperdoc:

Pretty terrible review. How about doing a proper comparison of the cards? It was good showing the performance of the 3700 series and Crossfire mode to the X2 card... but why only show the nVidia single card scores? It'd be a better comparison to put the SLI scores in there. Take the 8800GTX and the 8800GT 512MB in SLI mode as a comparison... as I highly doubt that the X2 comes close to either one in scores.

 

QFT

What I don't get is why you would use two different boards/chipsets when it was completely unnecessary. This is not good testing methodology and seems to hint at you having performed SLI benchmarks as well but then simply leaving those results out since AMD apparently rubs you guys the right way.

Yeah that's right, GeForce cards will run on crossfire boards, believe it or not.

Also, perhaps I overlooked this but I didn't see anywhere whether or not a crossfire board is required to run this card.

I guess there's a good reason I've never heard of hothardware.com before today. Wow, your forums suck too.. flash-based? bleh...
 

Hello general assumptions.. give me a break.  They tested a single card against another single card.. They are one of the few sites that included standard crossfire numbers as well..  Why would they include sli when that is way out of the price of this X2 ? And on top of that you can see it in relation to the GTX which is basically the same price. Next time you post here make sure you read the review first because you make it sound like their being biased which youd know isnt true if you took the time to read. 

They used two boards because those are the boards with "official" support for their technologies SLI and crossfire respectively. The majority of people are not gona buy a crossfire intel board and stick a GTX in it and vice versa. When you fellas grow up, ya'll come back now. 

FlyinBrian:

They used two boards because those are the boards with "official" support for their technologies SLI and crossfire respectively. The majority of people are not gona buy a crossfire intel board and stick a GTX in it and vice versa. When you fellas grow up, ya'll come back now. 

 

But they didn't do SLI benchmarks so using two boards was a mistake. All it did is add another unnecessary variable into the equation. Your reasoning lacks reason Brian. FAIL.

The fact is that 680i boards are a rip-off compared to P35 boards and the P35s also overclock a bit better. Hence myself and many others who've done their research are running 8800-series cards on crossfire-capable boards, because that's where the best bang per buck is at the moment. Yeah, guess what, PCI-E is a standard so they are interchangeable until you want to run crossfire or SLI.

Way to be a fanboy though.

-phresh
 

I am really too old to be arguing about something as trivial as a pc component.. However I will explain it for you once again.. If your going to build around a Nvidia GTX would it not make sense to use a Nforce board so that one day you can put in another GTX later ? They didnt test SLI because there was no point, given the performance vs a single GTX you can clearly see that if SLI would of won. But then you are far outside of the price/performance of the single 3870x2 solution.  I once again reccomend for you to read the review and not just flip through the graphs.

To phresh: This forum is awesome and I respect it so I'm gonna refreign from starting a flame war, but if you think it sucks why create an account here & post twice. If your primary reason for joining this forum was to slam it then there's no need for a 3rd post!

BTW: It's common knowledge that any single card will run on any chipset... duh.

Thanks. If I was reviewing a game, I'd use HardOCP's approach, but to determine relative performance between two products, using a timedemo is the best method in my opinion.

I'll disagree with your assessment that this was a "terrible" review, but I see where you're coming from. The reason I don't test SLI is two-fold - 1) I compared single-cards throughout the benchmarks, and only included 3870 CrossFire as a reference point and 2) NVIDIA's 8800 GTX is the closes price-match to the X2.

HotHardware readers know that NVIDIA cards can be run in SLI mode, and there are a TON of SLI benchmarks on the site for all to see. This isn't "imsortaintopchardwareanddontknowmuch.com".

Everyone is making such a big deal about it but I think the performance ended up exactly where I thought it would.. basically 8800GTX ish performance with the right driver support of course. I think this card bought AMD some time but their next GPU had better really bring the goods or its gona be another long year for AMD. The price performance of this card is really good.. I think if it can be aquired for 399 ish then it would be a real deal. I would like to see a few more games thrown in when you guys get the time. I would also like to aquire the HIS overclocked turbo model instead of the reference design. My 2 cents.

Hi All, That's pretty much what I thought as well. New egg however has the cards in stock for this price though. http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=48&name=Video-Cards

Phresh,

Thanks for your input. We always value a new perspective here of course. However, you're sorely uninformed, or at least, you're not thinking through things carefully.

To your point on testing platforms - Let me ask you, what's the objective of a test setup for benchmarking? I'll answer for you. In a direct comparison, it's supposed to be evaluating what each product, under it's best performance condition, can do. Ask NVIDIA Marketing what their recommended test platform is and they'll tell you its an NVIDIA chipset, and that's FACT. Ask AMD and they'll say, it's an Intel chipset though it sort of even goes against their grain.

Now, consider that and the fact that this is a GPU REVIEW. The subtle variances between motherboard chipsets when you're testing at high res, high AA settings and high image quality settings, are totally meaningless. The tests are GPU bound, no if, ands or buts about it. Drop in the same CPU and you'll be looking at a 1-2% variance at most.

I do see your point about testing SLI versus the card. A pair of 8800GTs offer a comparable price point versus one of these cards. However, you have no idea of how much testing and under what timelines we had to get this testing done in. Three new driver drops in a week actually. So, would we have liked to show an 8800GT SLI setup? Yes but there just weren't enough hours in the day before launch.

Regardless, we appreciate your input but it sure would be nice if the accusations were kept in check and we could all have an intelligent conversation over it...

The "HardOCP" approach, which really isn't an exclusive of course to that site, is to use FRAPS, which introduces a lot of variables and dare I say, very confusing graphs.

That's their perogative of course but we personally think custom timedemos with average frame rate numbers are the way to go, where possible and then FRAPS or frame rate logging is OK, as long as you repeat the test a few dozen times and make doubly sure you take the same path. We've seen frame rates vary considerably under these conditions on many occasions though.

Wow the debut price is 450 which means sub 4 bill variants will come very soon... maybe I'll get 2 of these instead of Nvidias next flagship! Makes sense for me since I normally gravitate towards Intel chipsets!!!

I wouldn't mind seeing it compared to two 8800GT 512mbs. The total cost is roughly the same. The 3870 X2 is more versatile because it can be run on any board, but nonetheless considering the prices match up it should be included, if possible.

Davo do you guys still have the 3870x2 around ? If so, it would be great to see a few more games added to the review.

Like Bioshock!!!

Yes Bioshock, a modern racing game, Gears of war, ETC

 One Unreal 3 game would be nice, I agree.

Yeah, I still have the card. I've shyed away from UT3 games because they run well on just about anything. But I'm also working on a round-up of these cards and will include UT3 in the future.

Sorry I keep asking questions here but I am really interested in this product because my next build I am finally going to be done with Nforce boards (thank God) and I was curious what model of the regular 3870 was being used. The reason I ask is I was thinking of picking up two of the His radeon 3870 turbo models and using them in crossfire mode. They are factory overclocked to 850 mhz and run gddr4 at 2.38 gh. So with that In mind I am thinking that combination of overclock, memory bandwidth, and crossfire should be a high performance monster.. what do you think ?

I'm sure it would be plenty powerful, but why not get 1 3870 X2 and perhaps another 1 at a later date for crossfire... ahh to have the power of 4 GPUs under the hood!!!

This is very likely the route I'll be going this year.