Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2

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Max Slowik
Beth
Sapphire
Jun. 2, 2008

Specifications

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Introduction

After weeks of game-fueled bliss and a handful of competitive releases, I wondered if ATI's flagship still makes waves. While an HD 3870 X2 is an impressive stretch of hardware, is it really worth its salt? Although, dual-GPU salt's a little cheaper these days... by about fifty bucks. It's a $400 card now, which is a hair more than crazy but still shy of preposterous.

So why not just get two 3870s and rub a little CrossFire into your box? There are two reasons, really. For most people, that's just not an option. Dual-PCI-Express can easily tag a Benjamin onto the price of a motherboard, and, in Micro-ATX land, it's a mythical beast that visits overclockers in their dreams. And there's another thing: regular 3870s get the lower-binned GPUs--the faster-clocking chips go into the X2s.

But, lastly, the 3870 promises something else: tri- and quad-CrossFireX. But that begs the initial question: now that the release is behind us, how much awesome stuck to the HD 3870 X2, and how much washed away?

The Card & Bundle

Sapphire's been ATI's BFF since forever, which is why their X2 gets Ruby's lashed gaze on their hawt stickers. Besides that, it's a regular X2; stock everything. Stock red and black retention plate, stock dual-slot cooling, stock one-aluminum-and-one-copper heatsinks, and stock scary-looking blower.

In ATI style, the outputs go DVI-TV-DVI. There's one Composite TV breakout cable, two VGA adapters, one HDMI adapter, one CrossFire bridge, and two 4-pin-to-6-pin Molex power adapters. The power adapters are really a shame since, without an 8-pin plug in the socket, overclocking options are disabled--quite overlooked since many power supplies don't have 8-pin video power cables.

The power connectors are along the top edge of the card, which is thoughtful: it's so long that if the cables had to plug into the front edge, it might not fit in your case. Otherwise, there's little to gape at. The heatsink uses up the entertaining side of the card. Underneath it are twin 320-core GPUs with a PCI-Express chip halfway between them.

For software, Sapphire skips games and gives you video stuff. Cyberlink's DVD suite and Power DVD 7 (not 8) are handy for the DIY system-builder, since no version of Windows can play DVDs natively. And to make sure that you know, absolutely, that your swank new card rawks, devil sign they give you a copy of 3DMark '06.

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Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Specifications and Testing Setup
Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles
Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics
Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking
Page 6: Conclusion

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3 User Comments

1 - Posted by dude81 on June 3, 2008 - 6:07 am

"Best, er, only dual-GPU ATI card". What about 3850 X2?

2 - Posted by Max Slowik on June 3, 2008 - 11:53 am

Yeah, I wrote that before it was released. Kurtis, can we retract that? Also, Diamond has informed us that it was a mis-print that their 1GB 3870 has a 512-bit ring bus; it's still an impressive card, but it's just 256-bit.

3 - Posted by Kurtis on June 3, 2008 - 12:00 pm

dude81: Thanks for pointing out that error. That (and the 512-bit ring bus error) has now been corrected.

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