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eta on 3870 x2?

J1nxy said:
Have you even tried a 780i board????
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No I have not, nor do I plan on doing so as I have read enough reports from both reviewers, testers, friends in the OC community and the general public forums (both the reference and Asus board) to understand that the 780i chipset suffers the same inherent problems the 3 680i boards I had. e.g A0 and C1 problems with 4 sticks of ram, poor quad overclocking, NB heat issues which is most likely as it is more or less the same old 570 with an NF200 bridging chip added. I was going to jump on 780i, and even sold my current rig to do so but what with the above problems and add to that lack of 'official' support for 1600fsb why should I?

I loved my 680i boards which was great for C2D and 2gb of ram but things have moved on and Nvidia seems to have failed to evolve what is considered an 'enthusiast' board. Tri SLI is also rumoured to scale poorly which hopefully (but doubtfull) can be sorted with decent drivers.
 
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Seems to be doing overclock wise quite well to me, got it at the same stable OC as my X38, with less volts and the mem is also running higher. Thats a Q6600 @ 3.6 and 4 x 1GB Ballistix 5300 @ 500. Not saying its the best board in the world but would rather be able to run 2 or 3 Nvidia cards, than the 2x3870s I've just flogged.

On the scaling point, we have no indication of how well Crossfire-X scales yet, and Tri-SLI has been hitting the CPU limit rather than the GPU on on most things I've read.
 
Are they going to be using DirectX10 to make tri-sli/crossfire x a bit more useful? Remember reading of how quad sli was limited by directx9 in some random report ages ago. Hopefully they can find something good to do with DX10 soon....
 
schumi84 said:
I dont know whether i can see these coming in at less than 250 really, what with a single 3870 currently selling for between 160 and 170.
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not to jump out and have a go at OCUK AGAIN, but for a month now getting a 3870 for £140 has been incredibly easy, there are several available in and out of stock at several places from £125-£140, with i think 3 uk places selling them at £130 today. ocuk used to be bad on prices, got REALLY competitive a while ago(i have bad memory for time/sense of time but guess 1-2 years ago) but for 6 months i've only seen 1-2 items out of 100's that are cheaper on ocuk. anything high end, cpu's, mobo's, gfx's not see a single item cheaper on ocuk.

seriously, you guys need to do something about it.


as for loadsamoney, seriously, we're all bored with it, you're entire argument is look what ati have to do to compete and laugh at them. well done, now what are nvidia doing to compete with ati's card, oh look, they are making a dual gpu card, exactly the same, talk about biased.


ati's hardware is great, ati's buying off software companies to design games for specific hardware isn't anywhere near as good as nvidia's. i've said before, its almost anti-competition law breaking stuff nvidia is doing here to maintain a lead. in non TWIMTBP games a 3870 can, in a bunch , perform closely to a 8800gtx. in TWIMTBP games, a 3870 seems to get spanked by a gf4ti4600. a dual 3870 won't "just" beat a 8800gtx, in some games it will be quite a margin ahead, in non nvidia games it will spank a gtx, and in a lot of nvidia games it should still be faster at least.
 
If this card has 2 lots of memory, I would be dissapointed if it works like current SLi and Crossfire ... and can only use 512mb ... seems a bit silly that they didn't just share it if this is the case.
Nvidias GX2 is not a path I would want to tread, and if this is the same with the exception of one PCB then it won't compete TBH.

I don't think ATi have (or can ? possibly a hardware limitation ?) fixed there AA performance since the 2900 series ... thats will hurt sales for the like s of me, who want a card to have hi res and good levels of AA and AF in modern games with good frame rates.

No way of telling until its out, but to me it just sounds like a tidier version of gx2.
 
the connection between core and memory is what takes up almost all the circuitry on the card. reason the gt/3800 series are so much cheaper than the previous is the massive cut down in traces needed, dropped from 8 layer pcb's, lot less electronic interference. the mem bus is whats responsible for a huge portion of the cost. having two cores sharing the memory would be more than doubling the traces needed, as each core would need an entire 2nd lot of traces to the memory, thats how it works, and because of the amount of routing and layers more that would take the paths would have to spread out a lot further and would take up massively more effort than now. 2 cores when just slammed on same pcb will not share the memory, as its completely not feasable, 2 cores on one die with a shared mem controller would be an entirely different situation and thats what its sounding like the R700 and most likely, future nvidia cores too, will be doing.
 
But ATI's crossfire works so much better than SLI. Which should (we hope) bring some good AA performance to the table
 
No its makes next to no difference to how AA performs, at least with 2x3870, you turn on AA the performance nose dives. Its a fundamental short coming of the GPU design. No AA good performance, AA on poor performance, simple as.

The 8800GTX stomps 2x3870s when AA is on 2x8800GTX destroys is.
 
Looking good :cool:

amdradeonhd3870x2cc02uy8.jpg


amdradeonhd3870x2cc04fp1.jpg
 
bull, absolute bull, 4xaa was **** NO SWEARING poor when first release, it did get loads, absolutely loads better. but again its design for DEV'S, not for DEV'S paid off by nvidia to do things nvidia's way.

Dev's in general wanted to go away from hardware AA, because as hardware AA is it doesn't work fantastically with HDR, it does work, i'm saying, because of the way it works quality isn't as good as they want. custom engine done AA was the way a lot of developers wanted, and still want to move forwards, we've had lots of games, dozens already where AA isn't easy to enable, some you can't use it at all as they are design to do some level of engine based AA. it isn't perfect at all but it shoudl be in the future, but the idea is that you need programable hardware to do it, which AA hardware isn't. so ATi built a programable core with massive power, then nvidia paid dozens of companies to not use it very well. such is life.

well, i tried two sites, xbit and anand, not the best anymore, http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3151&p=6

ridiculous graphs/tables at the end tbh, but the performance gap here closed from oblivion non AA to oblivion with AA, the performance hit with AA was HIGHER on the 8800gt than the 3870.

AA performance was poor at best when the 2900xt first came out, in several games only, and of all those reviews lots showed almost identical numbers with 4xaa as 8xaa :o, which if you recall nvidia looked awful in vista with hl2 because the game defaulted to higher AA when you went with 4xaa in the menu. games made years ago simply don't know there will be 4 new AA options in the future and you can't gaurentee they'll all work off the bat.
 
Not really a review, just a news item and note that it says that you need 2 x 16 PCI-E to run them.
 
drunkenmaster said:
bull, absolute bull, 4xaa was **** NO SWEARING poor when first release, it did get loads, absolutely loads better. but again its design for DEV'S, not for DEV'S paid off by nvidia to do things nvidia's way.
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Just so you know, I've owned both 2 x2900Pros and 2x3870s both running on a X38 board and so have personal experience of the performance degradation enabling AA has regardless of at what setting. The drivers did improve things, but fundamentally not significantly when AA was enabled, with no AA some very impressive driver optimisation went on.

I now run a pair of 8800GTXs on a 780i and they destroy the 3870s performance wise, and cost me in total about 50 more.
 
Yes to a degree but still not to the extent you use to see in the x1900 days and it doesn't bring the performance at higher res and with AA to the same levels as a single 8800GTX most of the time. With no AA it will beat the 8800GTX with AA enabled then it deosn't
 
drunkenmaster said:
Dev's in general wanted to go away from hardware AA, because as hardware AA is it doesn't work fantastically with HDR, it does work, i'm saying, because of the way it works quality isn't as good as they want. custom engine done AA was the way a lot of developers wanted, and still want to move forwards, we've had lots of games, dozens already where AA isn't easy to enable, some you can't use it at all as they are design to do some level of engine based AA. it isn't perfect at all but it shoudl be in the future, but the idea is that you need programable hardware to do it, which AA hardware isn't. so ATi built a programable core with massive power, then nvidia paid dozens of companies to not use it very well. such is life.
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But the thing is software AA in every game that implements it to date, is very poor quality compared to hardware AA.
IMO it was a bad move on AMD/ATI to rely on that, especially since ATI's previous products had the edge on AA over nvidia in AA IQ and performance with AA.
Devs may want it, I certainly don't .... I took one game back for a refund recently when I couldn't force AA on, in future I will check game reviews/user experience and if no hardware aa support I won't buy it :)
 
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