3870 X2 is current fasted vid card out...

[SUBMAN1]

But with 2x GPU's, it sucks as much power as an 8800 Ultra. It is considerably faster than the 8800 Ultra though.

Beats the 8800 Ultra

It was only a matter of time before someone would get their hands on a Radeon HD 3870 X2 and run some benchmarks on it and once again it's a Chinese site, this time PCOnline. There's no less than 17 pages of stuff about the cards with pictures of it in the nude and even some power readings, but we'll try to stick to the important bits here.

First of all, yes, it beats the 8800 Ultra hands down in most of the benchmarks, with Crysis and Bioshock being the exclusions, but this is most likely going to be a drivers issue with CrossFire not kicking in properly.

As for the default 3DMark06 test, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 managed to produce a score of 18,467 whereas the 8800 Ultra only musters 14,197. Push the resolution up to 2,560x1,600 and the Radeon HD 3870 X2 scores 12,578 versus 8,746 for the 8800 Ultra.

As for the game benchmarks, well, we suggest you take a look for yourself. One interesting thing is the overall PSU load for the system which measures 303W with the 8800 Ultra and 334W with the Radeon HD 3870 X2, not a huge dissadvantage when you consider that you're in actual fact running two cards.

http://www.pconline.com.cn/diy/graph...1/1210234.html

Chinese are good at leaking stuff like this.

-S

[JSLTIGER]

Not two Ultra's in SLI mode though, which is essentially what this is...3870s in Crossfire on a single PCB.

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by JSLTIGER

Not two Ultra's in SLI mode though, which is essentially what this is...3870s in Crossfire on a single PCB.

Dual GPU is the future with ATI - just like with CPU's. I doubt they will continue much in the single GPU area accept where price is a concern, so expect every new board from ATI to be multi GPU.

Their next GPU that is due out is a scalable archetecture (R700). You add as many cores as you want to achieve the disired performance you are looking for. All the GPU's will be manufacturered the same and you just add more as needed. THis saves on cost because all the GPU's will be made on only one line. So you can make a crazy fast card by adding a ton of GPU's to it.

On your Ultra in SLI - simple, just add two of these X3870's in Crossfire for a two card solution and you will again smear the Ultra's in SLI.

Welcome to the future in graphics. You are getting a tiny taste of it in the 3870 X2 right now.

-S