ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 @ [H]

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FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 - One of the more anticipated video cards of this year is finally here, AMD is launching the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. What will two 3870 GPUs on one board do for you in gaming? We are going to find out exactly that in Crysis, UT3, COD 4 and HL2.

AMD has delivered an impressive piece of technology; the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. While it has some trouble catching up to the performance of the GeForce 8800 GTX, it produces a satisfying gameplay experience. The fact is that unless you are running a 30” monitor the HD 3870 X2 is likely going to “outrun” your display anyway.
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Just had a quick read through before hitting the sack (5am uk time) never notcied anything about the card noise though? 2 articles ive seen so far had very contradicting results, 1 said it was very quiet, another said another said it was amazingly loud. Any opinions on this?

Weird thing is the rumoured uk price for this is £330 and a standard gtx can be snagged for about £245, can't help but feel some eyebrows are gonna be raised tomorrow.
 
Nice Review,

Card isn't what i had hoped, I intend to build this month, was hoping to go x38/48 with a HD 3870 X2. Now I'm going to be stuck going 780i or sticking with my 680.

I was hoping for a big card here, to give me viable path to dual card and intel chipsets, or maybe press nvidia to allow SLI on x48. This card doesnt strike me as doing either.

Here's hoping the 9xxx from nvidia is big, but it won't be, hell it doesn't have to be.
 
Finally up, been waiting since 10:30!

EDIT: And now, disappointment. I was hoping for the early reviews (with the HD 3870 X2 ahead of everything) to be true.
 
Oh4Sh0 said:
thats quite dissapointing.
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Can't help but be dissapointed myself, i think people were expecting this thing to pound the ultra into the ground while screaming "whos your daddy??". :(

Quad crossfire still has a large question mark surrounding it as well, is it nothing but a crap broken gimmick like quad sli or does it *gasp* actually work in more than 3 or 4 games?
 
Chris_B said:
Just had a quick read through before hitting the sack (5am uk time) never notcied anything about the card noise though? 2 articles ive seen so far had very contradicting results, 1 said it was very quiet, another said another said it was amazingly loud. Any opinions on this?

Weird thing is the rumoured uk price for this is £330 and a standard gtx can be snagged for about £245, can't help but feel some eyebrows are gonna be raised tomorrow.
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The card is very quiet. Not a dust buster in any sense of the matter. Probably one of the best thermal stock solutions I have ever seen.

Will be interesting to see where the prices shake out at. I was told that 20,000 cards should be available for sale today.
 
Another generation of cards from AMD and the 8800GTX is still the performance king, almost 18 months later?

This is depressing.
 
I will say this, I discussed this article with AMD this weekend and they do not agree with our results. Their benchmarking shows the card to be faster. As noted, in the last driver they sent, AMD experienced a 60% fps increase in the Crysis canned GPU benchmark, we saw a couple frames a second in real gameplay. I usually do not read a bunch of other reviews, but I am going to be watching today. Also we are going to be doing some double checking this week with AMD to make sure we are correct. And as always, we want to be right in what we do, but I have said repeatedly for years now, we do real world gameplay because canned benchmarks do not always tell the tale. It seems to be getting that way even moreso now days.
 
Dozer said:
Another generation of cards from AMD and the 8800GTX is still the performance king, almost 18 months later?

This is depressing.
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do you just read one site's review or look at many and get a consesus b4 u comment on something being depressing

anandtech doesnt agree with kyles numbers
 
Why do I have this feeling the 9800GX2 card will be much more impressive than this. I'm not saying this card sucks but not beating a 18 month old product with so much r&d at this stage in the game is a major disappointment.

This 8800GTX that I got the day before it actually launced was the best investment I ever made.

Did Nv just dethrone ATI's coveted 9700 Pro as the best long term investment in GPU history?
 
POPEGOLD said:
Doesnt look like he ran with AA on howerver
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Worthless then if thats the case, whos gonna buy a high end card and NOT run with fsaa? It may be the achilles heel of the current amd design but its not like fsaa was introduced recently just to bone this generation of amd's cards.
 
POPEGOLD said:
Quick look at anand review and he has the 3870x2 trouncing the 8800gx across the board and with more games. Doesnt look like he ran with AA on howerver
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No AA for a high end card is USELess IMHO. People (err) at least I don't buy high end cards $400-$749 to run without AA
 
Chris_B said:
Worthless then if thats the case, whos gonna buy a high end card and NOT run with fsaa? It may be the achilles heel of the current amd design but its not like fsaa was introduced recently just to bone this generation of amd's cards.
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i didnt scroll all the way doen on anand's.... he did test with full AA and AF

and he shows the 3870 obliteratin the 8800 across the aboard in all games and by a wide margain
 
Chris_B said:
Worthless then if thats the case, whos gonna buy a high end card and NOT run with fsaa? It may be the achilles heel of the current amd design but its not like fsaa was introduced recently just to bone this generation of amd's cards.
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In Anand's review, CoD4 4xAA/16xAF, 3870X2 bests the GTX by 10-20 FPS depending on resolution.

In nearly every other game, it pretty much mops the floor with the GTX. Up to 50 FPS difference in some cases.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
No AA for a high end card is USELess IMHO. People (err) at least I don't buy high end cards $400-$749 to run without AA
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i made a misake anand did test with aa and af and the 3870 crushed the 8800GTX across the board pretty bad

wierd that kyle and anand got totally different numbers
 
POPEGOLD said:
Quick look at anand review and he has the 3870x2 trouncing the 8800gx across the board and with more games. Doesnt look like he ran with AA on howerver
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And I know I spend $450 on a video card to not use AA.....oh wait.
 
POPEGOLD said:
i didnt scroll all the way doen on anand's.... he did test with full AA and AF

and he shows the 3870 obliteratin the 8800 across the aboard in all games and by a wide margain
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hmm, why such a discrepancy? Maybe I should wait for more reviews? :confused:
 
AceCR42 said:
In Anand's review, CoD4 4xAA/16xAF, 3870X2 bests the GTX by 10-20 FPS depending on resolution.

In nearly every other game, it pretty much mops the floor with the GTX. Up to 50 FPS difference in some cases.
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ANAND has the 3870X2 obilterating the 8800gtx and ultra for that matter

but kyle has the 3870X2 losing

dont get it
 
AceCR42 said:
In Anand's review, CoD4 4xAA/16xAF, 3870X2 bests the GTX by 10-20 FPS depending on resolution.

In nearly every other game, it pretty much mops the floor with the GTX. Up to 50 FPS difference in some cases.
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Strange if thats the case, not been to anandtech in a while though. Do they do real world testing or do they sit back and type "timedemo 1" into the console and hit enter?
 
POPEGOLD said:
i didnt scroll all the way doen on anand's.... he did test with full AA and AF

and he shows the 3870 obliteratin the 8800 across the aboard in all games and by a wide margain
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Is he running canned benchmarks or is he evaluating the real gameplay the card produces? I do not know how he tests any more as I dont pay much attention to it.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
hmm, why such a discrepancy? Maybe I should wait for more reviews? :confused:
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my bad kyle... i just scanned anands review... but he indeed does test with full AA and AF and is showing the 3870 x2 wiping the mat with the 8800gtx badly...

and AMD did disagree with your numbers... anand does as well... any theories?
 
Why does SKYMTLs review have different take on Crysis?
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/4236-ati-radeon-hd3870-x2-1gb-review-10.html
HD3870X2-54.JPG




HD3870X2-54.JPG




Kyle do you have the same new drivers that these other reviewers are using?
 
Just had a squint, quite the difference to say the least, the ultra is getting spanked around in that article. Used to seeing a few fps difference here and there in review but the difference is pretty massive this time around. :confused:
 
Chris_B said:
Strange if thats the case, not been to anandtech in a while though. Do they do real world testing or do they sit back and type "timedemo 1" into the console and hit enter?
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They do the 'timedemo1' thing if the game has an included benchmark, else they run a custom in-game benchmark, as is the case with Bioshock and CoD4.

Still, I mean, it's almost as if Kyle and Anand were reviewing two completely different GPU's :\
 
What you are seeing Anand benchmark on COD4 is a cut scene.....

A surprisingly successful FPS on the PC, Call of Duty 4 also lacks any sort of in-game benchmark so we benchmark the cut scene at the beginning of the first mission. We start the frame rate counter as soon as we're in the helicopter and stop once the man in the chair gets shot.
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The test setups are dramatically different check them out.

Hard OCP is using Vista 64bit with an intel X38 and C2D and Anand is using Vista 32bit Nvidia 780i and a Quad Core
 
KiUNT said:
Why does SKYMTLs review have different take on Crysis?
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/4236-ati-radeon-hd3870-x2-1gb-review-10.html
http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/skymtl/GPU/HD3870X2/HD3870X2-54.JPG



http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/skymtl/GPU/HD3870X2/HD3870X2-54.JPG



Kyle do you have the same new drivers that these other reviewers are using?
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Yes, we explained this in our article....

During our evaluation processes AMD made some breakthroughs in Crysis with the 3870 X2 driver. We are using one of those driver builds they provided for us in our testing, which smoothed out performance compared to the driver build we had started with. A couple of days ago AMD came to us with yet another new driver build that further improves 3870 X2 performance, however that driver did not make it into our evaluation. AMD had noted Crysis improvements up to ~60% on the built-in GPU test, but going back and spot checking this in real world gameplay, we saw at best a 2 fps improvement at times. No other games we were using to evaluate were noted as having improvements, so we moved on with the previous driver as noted.
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Also worth noting is that even AMD will tell you they lose in Crysis, so I have no idea how those numbers came into being.
 
I expect more mature drivers to bring some improvement. As it is though, I wish AMD came up with this 18 months ago, not now. There is an upside to still using a 17in LCD, an 8800gt is MORE then enough for me! :p
 
Lord_Exodia said:
The test setups are dramatically different check them out.

Hard OCP is using Vista 64bit with an intel X38 and C2D and Anand is using Vista 32bit Nvidia 780i and a Quad Core
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At these high resolustions the games are not coming close to being CPU bound....
 
Anandtech also uses the canned benchmark in Crysis.

Crysis ships with a built-in GPU benchmark, unfortunately the game is still too stressful to run at the highest quality settings so we're left running at the "high" defaults with no AA and at only two resolutions.
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As well as a built in fly-by in UT3 that is NO WAY resembles gameplay.

We used the built-in vCTF flyby in Unreal Tournament 3, using the -compatscale=5 switch to ensure the highest in-game quality settings were used. We ran each flyby for 90 seconds and are reporting the average frame rates.
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I am telling you guys right now, canned benchmarks of this nature do NOT tell the tale. I have been saying this for five years now and it gets more and more evident every time a new card is released.


Edit: And even as far as canned benchmarks go, both of those are SHIT for video testing....
 
Because apparently the 8800 GTS 512 beats the 8800GTX almost across the board. I'm not sure how seriously I can take a review that shows that type of skewed result.

Apparently I should be buying the $140 cheaper GTS and ditching my GTX altogether.
 
ryankenn said:
Because apparently the 8800 GTS 512 beats the 8800GTX almost across the board. I'm not sure how seriously I can take a review that shows that type of skewed result.

Apparently I should be buying the $140 cheaper GTS and ditching my GTX altogether.
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QFT ^^^ Wow just noticed that. This is a prime example of what the [H] testing methodology has been my readers choice for years. What matters is what YOU will experience when you remove the frickin card from the box, plug it in and install it and actually PLAY not how it runs when you watch a timedemo or watch a canned scene.

Unless of course if that's what you do with your rig all day then I say hey WTF get the 3870X2:D
 
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