Date:
Monday , January 28, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD's 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.

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System Test Setup

For evaluation we are using a Gigabyte X38-DQ6. We are using an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz processor and 2GB of Corsair XMS2 Dominator CM2X1024-8888C4D at 4-4-4-12 2T. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

We are using the latest drivers for both video cards, for the 8800 GTX that is 169.28 beta driver, and for the 3870 X2 it is an ATI Catalyst provided driver with the latest Crysis performance fixes for CrossFire.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate.

In our tables and graphs in this evaluation the abbreviation “TRMS” Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 8 series video cards. CSAA indicates the use of NVIDIA’s CSAA AA mode. “ADSS” indicates the use of Adaptive Supersampling on ATI GPU based video cards.