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MSI Radeon HD 3870 X2 OC Graphics Card review

The 8800GT is louder and hotter.

Those scores overall are so so, seem to be slower that other sites would suggest too?

edit: the scores are slower because TweakTown are using a PCi 1.0 board, surely that's leaning towards blatant stupidity? We already know there's a performance hit for a single gpu let alone two on one pci bus!
 
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GT louder than a 3870X2? Hmmm odd because that would make a 3870X2 quiet ALL of the time.

If those benchmarks are correct the 8800GTS 512 is the way to go, the 3870X2 will be a waste of power and money, obviously we will have to wait 8 months for it to perform to its peak like with the 2900 :rolleyes:
 
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lol if you want this card make sure you don;t play using AA.

go on willhub i know your going to get this card now.
 
well its the only hardware site that ive seen today that has both vista and xp tests and seen a few of there other tests and they normally seem solid!!
 
Cyber-Mav said:
im not impressed.
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Hardly surprising - ATi could double the performance of a pair of Ultras and you'd still say that. :rolleyes:

Blimey that can't be right, hardly better than a GTS by the looks of it there.
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Yeah, not really sure what to think after that one. I can't help but think that maybe they're doing something wrong as Crossfire doesn't seem to apply properly most of the time.

But then again, most likely it's just down to drivers. I'm not sure if I should go with one of these and place my faith in ATi to wring out the performance that this thing should achieve, or to just play it safe (probably still sell my 8800GT and move back to a 3870XT).

I think price is going to make or break this card.
 
To be honest that wasn't as in-depth as I'd like to have seen. Some benchmarks seem cherry picked. By that I mean in some tests completely missing out the 1920 resolution and other things.

I was actually disappointed to see how naff the performance seemed to be. Obviously the ASUS TOP card is an overclocked model, but still, so is the MSI unit.

If based on the strength of that review, I'd buy an 8800gts 512mb, overclock it and be done with it, and saved myself somewhere in the region of £120!

Obviously the first proper review site out there so taking with some salt.

Matthew
 
The review is ok but in the first page it should say with big bold letters "Hey we are trying this state of the art card on our old, P35 based, non PCI 2.0 motherboard"
 
bidermaier said:
The review is ok but in the first page it should say with big bold letters "Hey we are trying this state of the art card on our old, P35 based, non PCI 2.0 motherboard"
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That's a good point - and wasn't there another site that claimed it can cause a 15-20% performance hit?
 
With pretty much the same fan design as the normal HD 3870 it comes as no surprise that it’s putting out similar noise levels.
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Funny that as the fan design is nothing like the 3870 and virtually identical to the 2900xt. :o


And as usual thats one review contradicting another, 1 review saying its running quiet, another saying omg this thing drowns out trains!!!11156".

:o


I realy dunno wtf is up with reviewers these days, seems results vary wildly from fairly similar setups. Getting to the point where its getting dubious to trust them at all.
 
Tute said:
as Crossfire doesn't seem to apply properly most of the time.
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i was under the impression it doesnt use crossfire at all, and that it is literally one card, and is recognised as one card?

I realy dunno wtf is up with reviewers these days, seems results vary wildly from fairly similar setups. Getting to the point where its getting dubious to trust them at all.
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every review is biased. every single reviewer will have a preferred choice of hardware brand, Nvidia, ATI, AMD, intel, etc.
 
ergonomics said:
i was under the impression it doesnt use crossfire at all, and that it is literally one card, and is recognised as one card?
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Well that's what I thought I read, but it seems that even though it behaves as one card, it still has the limitations of a Crossfire setup, i.e the profiles, the scaling, and the driver optimisations.
 
i see. i really wish they would stop using games such as half life 2 episode 1 as a benchmark. no-one really cares what the fps are, when pretty much every card can get over 130
 
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