[grogi]

AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
"ATi's had a rough time of it over the past year or so with every single one of its last generation cards failing to live up to expectations and nVidia's equivalents consistently beating them on performance. However, with the release of the HD 3870 and HD 3850 at the tail end of last year, ATI looked to be on the up again. With decent performance, unbeatable features, and competitive prices these cards made for a worthwhile alternative to nVidia's mainstream and enthusiast products.

Unfortunately, while the big money is to be made in these mid-range (£50 - £150) markets, something called the halo effect means that having the fastest card available still has significant influence over the general public's buying habits. Put simply, if someone hears one company makes the fastest card available, they're going to assume the other products the company produces are also the fastest in their respective sectors. The fact this mentality is completely ridiculous causes much frustration for manufacturers and journalists alike but there's nothing we or they can do about it so manufacturers will always seek to gain the performance crown just to convince these people."

R680: AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
"For the last fifteen months, the graphics industry has been an uncharacteristically one-sided affair, with Nvidia practically dominating proceedings ever since it launched its hugely successful G80 graphics processing unit.

While Nvidia was busy selling bucket loads of GeForce 8800s, ATI was finishing its integration into the AMD portfolio after its buyout in the second half of 2006 and, at the same time, the graphics chip vendor was trying to ready its DirectX 10-based R600 GPU for release.

R600 was then delayed and, when it finally launched as the Radeon HD 2900 XT, it ended up being only marginally less underwhelming than the GeForce 8600-series launch that happened just a month earlier. And it then went from bad to worse when the mid-range Radeon HD 2000-series cards launched, as they underperformed at their price point—we continued to recommend the previous generation mid-range cards—and they could easily be classed as last year’s low-point in the graphics industry."

HD 3870 in Crossfire vs. HD 3870 X2
"The one downside about graphics cards which carry two cores on the singular PCB is that they’re normally slower than buying two separate cards based on the same tech. What we’re going to look at here today is the performance of the HD 3870 X2 compared to the HD 3870 in Crossfire.

Okay, let’s clear that up a little bit more. What we have with us is the HD 3870 X2 from MSI coming in at 860MHz core and 1800MHz DDR on the 1GB of GDDR3 memory. At the other end of the spectrum we have two HD 3870 cards running in Crossfire which carry a core clock of 775MHz with the 512MB of GDDR4 coming in at a hefty 2250MHz DDR.

We’re not going to look at the packages etc. since we’ve covered that side of things with the cards separately in the past. We’re simply just going to get stuck straight into the benchmarking, so let’s leave it at that and move on."