just arrived..my personal review of 3870x2

ozzaman · 29 Jan 2008 at 22:44

bimmerboii, do you reckon in game performance you get 30fps in Crysis or does it feel more or less. I think everyone now says that the Crysis benchmark tool is 'synthetic' and doesn't reflect actual performance. Maybe give fraps a go?

gadgets · 29 Jan 2008 at 22:50

HarryPainful said:
nice PJ's

and carpet slippers, look just like my grandads and he's 87

gadgets · 29 Jan 2008 at 22:52

Gerard said:
Christ almighty, still trying to find it and can i call back in the morning. Its not bad enough that virtually anything i order next day service comes in a day late and i dont see any sign of refund coming from anywhere now theyre managing to lose parcels.

On the radeon front though bit strange that black screen installation thing. Think im just gonna try the 8.1 drivers and the hot fix instead of the cd drivers, theyre bound to be ages out of date.

Heatsink has no gawdy sticker on the his version which is nice, would look better if it retained the 2900xt flame heatsink effect though.

i do belive that is called breach of contract and paying premium price for a specific service and not receiving it. most places give a refund on delivery for this

Delmonte251 · 29 Jan 2008 at 22:58

Nice review, good read that.

Perfect_Chaos · 29 Jan 2008 at 23:13

i still urge anyone with an SLi mobo to get 2 8800 GT cards instead of one of these.

willhub · 29 Jan 2008 at 23:19

crysis benchmarks DX9 or 10?

muon · 29 Jan 2008 at 23:40

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru.../4236-ati-radeon-hd3870-x2-1gb-review-12.html

A New Hope…..

ATI pulled a rabbit out of their collective hats with only 3 days to go before the NDA was lifted with a new driver release. The performance difference was so extreme I couldn’t ignore it and I had to redo EVERY test over again and rewrite a significant part of this review. Not only were the issues I had mentioned above completely solved but the performance difference in games like Crysis, World in Conflict and Call of Juarez was like night and day. It is like the entire driver team suddenly sat up, shouted “Eureka!!” and boosted performance by leaps and bounds. They breathed new life into the HD3870 X2 making it a great card where an ok card once existed.

Stay tuned for these drivers to be released to the general public.

A bit of hyperbole here. But other sites also suggest that there is an improvement in crysis with this unreleased driver.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...70_x2/25/#abschnitt_alter_gegen_neuer_treiber

Mr Latte · 29 Jan 2008 at 23:53

Perfect_Chaos said:
i still urge anyone with an SLi mobo to get 2 8800 GT cards instead of one of these.

So for £300 or less can you give a comparison to performance

Chronictank · 30 Jan 2008 at 01:42

any chance you can run the ocUK crysis benchmark so we can compare it to the sli's in the chart ?

HeX · 30 Jan 2008 at 08:25

bimmerboii said:
Edit: After a good 30min play of Crysis, the graphics card cooler fan started to spin up.. and yes it is noisy.

Ah damn it

Well there is still a ray of hope with the Powercolour version with the different cooler...

willhub · 30 Jan 2008 at 10:54

Why the hell cant ATi learn and wack on a quiet cooler, I know they can do it, if it increased the price by 10 or 20 quid but the cooler was obvioulsy a lot better and more like an aftermarket cooler I think everyone would understand!!

bimmerboii · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:07

willhub said:
crysis benchmarks DX9 or 10?

DX9.. settings used are all set to HIGH. the "VERY HIGH" setting seems to be greyed out.. dunno how to fix that

Chronictank said:
any chance you can run the ocUK crysis benchmark so we can compare it to the sli's in the chart ?

sorry but what is the ocuk crysis benchmark?

johny dolan · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:11

bimmerboii said:
and another thing.. why is "VERY HIGH" setting still greyed out on my settings screen? How do i choose DX10?

The very high settings and dx10 are only available with vista.Win xp is dx9 only.

bimmerboii · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:12

johny dolan said:
The very high settings and dx10 are only available with vista.Win xp is dx9 only.

i am using vista ultimate x86

Durzel · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:29

Can I ask a dumb question as I can't seem to get a definitive answer on this:

Is it worth me buying this card to replace my X1900 Crossfire setup? I realise it might not be a huge jump in performance but right now a 1 card setup suits me better, and I might even get a second later once I've upgraded the rest of my system. I'm currently running a Asus P5W64-WS motherboard which is PCI-E 1.1 - will that be a bottleneck?

Oh, and my PSU is only a FSP 700W with 2 6-pin PCI-E connectors - will that be an issue?

(ok, that was several questions in one)

Thanks in advance.

HeX · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:36

Yes it's a good upgrade.

700W would be more than ample.

Card is only PCI-E 1.1 anyway.

Durzel · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:37

HeX said:
Yes it's a good upgrade.

700W would be more than ample.

Card is only PCI-E 1.1 anyway.

Thanks. Why is it that several sites seem to say that you get performance boosts on PCI-E 2.0 with these cards? Is this HIS card specifically lower spec than the other X2s?

HeX · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:43

Durzel said:
Thanks. Why is it that several sites seem to say that you get performance boosts on PCI-E 2.0 with these cards? Is this HIS card specifically lower spec than the other X2s?

Nope, they were talking rubbish.

The brige chip used to split the PCI-E lanes is only PCI-E 1.1 so even though the GPU's can use PCI-E 2.0 the bridge chip can't so PCI-E 2.0 gives nothing extra over 1.1 on this card.

Durzel · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:45

HeX said:
Nope, they were talking rubbish.

The brige chip used to split the PCI-E lanes is only PCI-E 1.1 so even though the GPU's can use PCI-E 2.0 the bridge chip can't so PCI-E 2.0 gives nothing extra over 1.1 on this card.

Thanks, you're an absolute star.

I've just noticed the card has an 8-pin and a 6-pin connector... I'm totally out of the loop on graphics cards as I haven't kept up since I bought my X1900s, can I just buy a 6-pin to 8-pin adapter or is it possible to plug in a 6-pin into the 8-pin socket? Very confusing (why do they keep changing the damn power inputs!)

It doesn't look like the HIS card comes with any kind of adapter in the box from the pictures in this thread.

HeX · 30 Jan 2008 at 11:49

Durzel said:
Thanks, you're an absolute star.

I've just noticed the card has an 8-pin and a 6-pin connector... I'm totally out of the loop on graphics cards as I haven't kept up since I bought my X1900s, can I just buy a 6-pin to 8-pin adapter or is it possible to plug in a 6-pin into the 8-pin socket? Very confusing (why do they keep changing the damn power inputs!)

It doesn't look like the HIS card comes with any kind of adapter in the box from the pictures in this thread.

You can just use 2 x 6pin and it'll work fine, but it won't let you overclock.

If you want to overclock you will need to get a 6-8pin converter