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Reviews Around The Web
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Friday, February 15, 2008
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ATI is back in the game with their high end 3870X2 being the top performing video card on the market today. DirectX 10.1 offers new features that haven't made the jump to the NVIDIA side of things. The decreased power draw of the 3870x2 card meant that putting two chips on one board allowed the same power to be used versus the old generation 2900XT and was a major negative of ATI's last generation high-end. Today that has changed with the 3xxx series all on the 55 nanometer die process and power consumption levels back to normal. The advent of the HD3870X2 makes quad Crossfire a possibility with only two video cards.
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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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AMD has proven itself, successfully launching the Radeon HD 3870 X2 on schedule, and perhaps even more important than that, having actual products on retail shelves immediately. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 is essentially two Radeon HD 3870 GPUs stuck together on the same PCB is meant to be a 'transparent' single card solution, it doesn't require a supporting motherboard. The GPUs use a PCI Express 1.1 bridge to communicate in much the same way Crossfire ATI cards would. However, because the X2 is meant to be a 'transparent' single card solution, it doesn't require a supporting motherboard, and in fact it opens the possibility for quad-Crossfire using two of these graphics cards.
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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While the Radeon HD 3870 X2 has the potential to become one of, if not the fastest graphics cards released to date, it's not something that I can recommend over Nvidia's current flagship GeForce 8800 Ultra and 8800 GTX cards because it's only as strong as its weakest link. Sadly for AMD's graphics product group, that means there's a long road ahead with driver support for this beast because, even from just looking at current releases, I believe there will be scenarios in the future where CrossFire isn't as well supported as it probably should be.
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The core frequency on the R680 is higher than that on an RV670, which is a shocking move. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 has a core clock of 775 MHz while the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 has been increased up to 825 MHz. This might have been down as the memory clock was decreased from 2.25GHz GDDR4 to 1.8GHz GDDR3. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2's cooling fan operates at 36dBA, which is just slighting higher than the 34dBA seen on the Radeon HD 3870. The boards peak power usage is also 91W higher than the Radeon HD 3870 at 196W under full load. Having two RV670 cores on one board doubles many things like the frame buffer size and the math processing power, but the power consumption does not double.
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ATI has plans to re-take the crown of fastest graphics-card on the market. That plan involves stitching two Radeon HD 3870s together on to one PCB. Will it work?
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Monday, January 28, 2008
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It has been a boring state of affairs in the graphics card industry with Nvidia ruling the roost for a long time. Today we take a look at ATI's new HD 3870 X2 card, do they finally have an answer to Nvidia's high end dominance? We think you might be surprised ....
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AMD officially launched their new high-end flagship graphics card today and this one has a pair of graphics processors on a single PCB. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 was codenamed R680 throughout its development. Although that codename implies the card is powered by a new GPU, it is not. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 is instead powered by a pair of RV670 GPUs linked together on a single PCB by a PCI Express fan-out switch. In essence, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is "CrossFire on a card" but with a small boost in clock speed for each GPU as well.
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