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The asus one looks pretty solid. 4DVI, free game, and improved cooling.
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The Official 3870X2 Reviews Thread
- Thread starter Albuquerque
- Start date
The asus one looks pretty solid. 4DVI, free game, and improved cooling.
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2006
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- Land of Long Horns
Wow, really nice looking cards...time to start selling stuff again 
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2006
That Asus card looks like it is not designed well with regards to crossfire 3870x2. It looks like if you have two of them on a mobo with only one extra slot of seperation between physical pci-e 16x slots the primary card will not be able to intake sufficient air. Just keep this in mind before buying if you plan on pushing it hard.
OP
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- Mar 26, 2003
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- North America
- Thread Starter
- #44
Yeah, with any X2-based card (NV or ATI) you'll want to make sure you have maximum airflow capacity around those cards. Especially if you start hooking them together... I can only imagine the heat that would come out the back of your system with a pair of those Asus cards at max OC playing Crysis 
OP
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- Thread Starter
- #45
Lots more reviews posted up this morning...
- Joined
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- Location
- Land of Long Horns
Here is a good collection of reviews
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=31&threadid=2147532
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=31&threadid=2147532
OP
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- Thread Starter
- #47
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- Chicago, IL
Hurry, someone get 2 and crossfire them!
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- Jul 21, 2006
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- CYYZ Pearson
I'm willing to bet you won't see that working properly for a little while, the X2's drivers are still being cleaned up, I doubt you'll see anything over 1.75x the performance.
But damn.
OP
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- Mar 26, 2003
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- Thread Starter
- #50
There are rumors circulating that several people have ahold of the quadfire beta drivers -- we might see some benches in the next few days.
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- Dec 26, 2006
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- Land of Long Horns
As far a s I know only AMD boards have the real quad fire capabilities, for 4 seperate cards I mean, guess the 2 x 3870X2's would also qualify as a quad fire setup.
MR-FIX-IT
Disabled
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- Jan 15, 2008
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- Somewhere on Long Island
Finally!!
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you AMD...
Some competition on the block.... and a chance to lower the prices....
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you AMD...
Some competition on the block.... and a chance to lower the prices....
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2002
- Location
- Denver, CO
So what's the deal with the stock fan placement on some of these cards? On the Saph, PC and MSI it looks like there is one fan on the end that is just channeling air into what looks like a chamber of heat pipes. Is the fan directly over a core?
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2001
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- Kansas, USA
No, on the reference design cards, there are heatsinks on top the cores. The fan blows air across the sinks.
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2001
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- Currently Nowhere
No, not really. This Extreme Tech article shows the 3870x2 looking good in synthetic benchmarks, but it pretty much gets spanked by a SINGLE 8800GTS/GTX in actual gaming benchmarks.
Nice try though.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2252547,00.asp
OP
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- Mar 26, 2003
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- Thread Starter
- #56
Depends on whose numbers you trust.
AnandTech didn't find anything like what ExtremeTech did.
Neither did HardwareCanucks
I'm not saying one is "more right" than another, but to use a single review site is a bit of a slanted approach. The general results from all the review sites suggest that ATi has one up on NV this round, speaking purely in terms of "single card" performance. But it will be short lived, as I'm quite sure NV is rapidly readying the 9800GX2 fleet as we type.
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- Sep 24, 2001
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If it takes 2 of ATI's GPU's to = 1 NV GPU, IMO that is still a spanking--even if talking only in terms of performance. This is not even taking into account power and heat issues with 2x the GPUs.
I have similar issues with ATI fans who like to compare an O/Ced 3870 to a non-O/Ced 8800.
That is... if you consider 3-5 FPS a spanking.
True, but I consider the extra $200 for the 8800GTX a spanking. $200/5fps = $40 per additional frame per second... OUCH!
OP
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- Thread Starter
- #59
So then, I assume you're going to have the exact same complaints about the 9800GX2?
I don't disagree that two chips is a bit ungainly, but at the same time, the whole concept of a single bigger and bigger and faster and faster chip is going to go the same way that new CPU's have. In other words, at a certain level of complexity, it will be more efficient (in terms of power, production rate, time and cost) to have multiple smaller cores than a single larger core.
We may not be at the end of the single-GPU era, but it is much closer now than it was five years ago. Just like five years ago, multi-core CPU's were essentially non-existant in the consumer space. Keep in mind that multi-core GPU platforms have been in the hands of big business for many years, just as multi-core CPU platforms were too. As the costs continue to make more sense, those multi-GPU arrangements will indeed make their way into the consumer platform.
Just like right now: would you consider someone with a single core CPU cutting edge? Would you consider someone with a dual-core CPU wasteful and deserving of an ***-kicking? Think about it.
