| Sapphire Radeon HD3870x2 (1Gb DDR3) |
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The power of two RV670 GPUs gives Sapphire an upper hand ... enthusiast gamers will love it.
INTRODUCTION
"Pioneers in a new era of how data is displayed and games are played, Sapphire shepherds the performance oriented with ground-breaking solutions to an environment that remains in a constant state of flux and ultimate evolution. For over ten years Sapphire has held true to its unwavering commitment, the commitment to deliver the most feature rich and soundly engineered products ... Our factory has always been the major manufacturer on ATI boards for most of the top ten tier 1 OEMs worldwide. With this background, you should undoubtedly be guaranteed of the impeccable quality, production capacity and product reliability of all ATI video boards and mainboards from SAPPHIRE."
Sapphire's partnership with AMD/ATI is undoubtedly a very successful one. With such a close relationship with AMD/ATI, Sapphire have been one of the first graphic cards manufacturers to release the much talked about ATI Radeon HD3870x2. This could give AMD a mini revival in the battle against Nvidia. It's the first time, in a long time that we've seen a graphics card that has 2 GPUs on a single PCB board. What's more, with recent release of ATI's Catalyst drivers v8.2, gamers can have the option of setting up a multi-GPU system via CrossfireX configuration ... bringing 2-way, 3-way and 4-way CrossfireX to the masses. Just imagine the power of 4 GPUs running on your system. You can read our recent article on how easy it is to Crossfire two totally different Radeon HD38xx cards from different manufacturers.
The Sapphire Radeon HD3870x2 is pretty much based on ATI's reference designs, and has all the standard features. If you look at the table below you'll see main differences betwen the original Radeon HD3870 and the HD3870x2. The two RV670 GPUs runs at slightly higher speed of 800Mhz, and because the HD3870x2 uses DDR3 instead ... the memory runs a lower speed of 900Mhz (1.8Ghz). How it works ... The two GPUs are linked with a PCIe 1.1 high-speed interconnect bridge, giving you bi-directional x16 lanes between the two. This will give the Radeon HD3870x2 performance similar to two Crossfire'd cards.
Since the Radeon HD3870x2 uses the same RV670 GPUs ... it still based on the 55nm production process and supports 320 stream processing units, with 256-bit memory interface, as well as support for DX10.1. However ths time round, the HD3870x2 uses DDR3 ram instead of DDR4 ram ... I guess this helps to reduce costs, especially when you have 1Gb onboard. All-in-all, it's still a very impressive feature list. This graphics card is slightly longer in length and also heavier in weight than most graphic cards. And the reason for this, is because the heatsink is very large and contains two cooling blocks, one for each GPU ... one aluminum and one copper. This is all cooled by one fan which is located towards the end of the card. You'll also notice that the card has 2 power connectors ... one standard 6-pin PCIe power and a newer 8-pin PCIe power.
We're expecting some good results from the Sapphire Radeon HD3870x2, it will probably be very similar to having two HD3870 cards. But what makes this card so appealing, is the possibility of getting two of these cards ... then setting up a 4-way CrossfireX configuration using 4 x RV670 GPUs on any given system. Now that would be something. There are several interesting questions which I hope to answer. If your a dedicated gamer (or an AMD fan), would you purchase just one Radeon HD3870x2 or to get 2 Radeon HD3870s? What are the real differences between the two cards, and which solution offers the best price/performance ratio? These are the questions which we hope to find out in this review. OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the Sapphire Radeon HD3870x2, and see how it competes against a single HD3870 and 2-way HD3870 in Crossfire mode ...
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