*** Unofficial 3870 X2 Reviews Thread ***

[firewolfsm]

The 8800GTS 512 can in a lot of cases

 

[thilanliyan]

From the fpslabs review Crysis at 1600x1200 High settings gets 21fps while in the InsideHW review it gets 37fps at the same settings...I wonder what the discrepancy is due to. InsideHW uses the 8.1 drivers and in the games they tested, there's a fairly decent advantage over the single 3870. Hopefully those kind of results translate into all games and not just the optimized ones.

 

[Elfear]

Check out the minimum fps in Crysis from the InsideHW review. Very impressive gains over the single HD3870.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

I am looking to upgrade from my GTX and I still dont think this card is the answer.

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: thilan29
From the fpslabs review Crysis at 1600x1200 High settings gets 21fps while in the InsideHW review it gets 37fps at the same settings...I wonder what the discrepancy is due to. InsideHW uses the 8.1 drivers and in the games they tested, there's a fairly decent advantage over the single 3870. Hopefully those kind of results translate into all games and not just the optimized ones.

The InsideHW review seemed quite biased in ATI's favor.

- The scores seemed higher.
- The benchmarks were fewer.
- The noise wasn't as loud as the HD2900XT (?!).
- There is little to no mention of CF's drawbacks.

 

[thilanliyan]

Ahh I see the difference now...FPSLabs was using Vista and I don't think they were using the 8.1 driver. InsideHW was using XP and the 8.1 driver. How much of a difference that makes I don't really know though.

 

[BFG10K]

I want a high end card really badly at this point but have no interest in anything operating on Crossfire or SLI.

Same here. I think the 3870 X2 is important to ATi because it allows them to briefly claim the "single card" performance crown but I'll be staying away from it because I don?t think it?s a robust long term solution.

 

[Demoth]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

I want a high end card really badly at this point but have no interest in anything operating on Crossfire or SLI.

Same here. I think the 3870 X2 is important to ATi because it allows them to briefly claim the "single card" performance crown but I'll be staying away from it because I don?t think it?s a robust long term solution.

The 3870 X2 is more then an attempt for a brief performance lead. This card is a natural start to ATI's ultimate goal of a single GPU design with higher end cards having multiple GPUs added. Going this route will ultimately lead to ATI"s manufacturers being able to quickly and cheaply mass produce any iteration of a generation that is in demand.

Multi-core CPUs, for most end users, is only applicable in a few applications and will be game limited for quite a while. Adding GPUs however translates to a theoretical linear increase in performance, limited as of now by Crossfire/SLI being in it's infancy and a few hardware design refinements.

If these reviews show nothing else, it shows ATI is well ahead of Nvidia when it comes to Crossfire.

This first round of cards though I would avoid. Way too much noise and still a high power draw. With some refinement and newer drivers, this card could signal the start of a power shift.

 

[Tempered81]

Originally posted by: WaTaGuMp
I am looking to upgrade from my GTX and I still dont think this card is the answer.

well you only have a few choices....

a gts 512, an ultra, or a 3870x2

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: CP5670

It only takes up two slots, just as a typical single card would. Then again, it certainly consumes the power that a dual-card setup would, and it definitely makes enough noise and produces enough heat to fool people into thinking it?s really two cards.

They forgot the most important thing, the fact that it has all the game compatibility issues of two cards.

I want a high end card really badly at this point but have no interest in anything operating on Crossfire or SLI. At least it's good to hear that R700 might not be as far off as we thought. If nothing else, it might spur Nvidia into action again.

I recently got a Crossfire setup and despite the doom and gloom that goes on in these forums about multi-GPU and how theres always 'problems' and 'issues'- I have experienced none and have played all the recent latest and older games on this setup including: Crysis, Stalker, HL2, cnc3 UT3, BF2, Civ4, Tribes and even older games like Emperor just to name a few. Most of the time when 'issues' arise its because people haven't diagnosed the problems correctly and are too quickly to blame it on 'oh it must be 'Crossfire/SLI/Vista' I would say if you want a High end card and if the X2 has the performance theres no reason not to go for it.

 

[crisium]

Single GTS 512mb beats it sometimes. Hmm. GTS 512mb seems to be the best high end card. Costs more than GT, but because it's G92 it's guarenteed to always outperform it. Plus you get the benefit of sometimes outdoing the GTX. 3870X2 you get performance that more often than not is the top performer, but is it worth the $100 more than the GTX 512? Or the $200 more than GT? Especially if those cards will sometimes be as good, or better. Personally I would never pay more than $250 for a GFX card anyway, but it's a dilemma if you're willing to spend that much.

 

[Belles Toaster]

Tom's hardware has a good review and states they ship tonight, for whatever that means.

 

[CP5670]

Originally posted by: Sylvanas

Originally posted by: CP5670

It only takes up two slots, just as a typical single card would. Then again, it certainly consumes the power that a dual-card setup would, and it definitely makes enough noise and produces enough heat to fool people into thinking it?s really two cards.

They forgot the most important thing, the fact that it has all the game compatibility issues of two cards.

I want a high end card really badly at this point but have no interest in anything operating on Crossfire or SLI. At least it's good to hear that R700 might not be as far off as we thought. If nothing else, it might spur Nvidia into action again.

I recently got a Crossfire setup and despite the doom and gloom that goes on in these forums about multi-GPU and how theres always 'problems' and 'issues'- I have experienced none and have played all the recent latest and older games on this setup including: Crysis, Stalker, HL2, cnc3 UT3, BF2, Civ4, Tribes and even older games like Emperor just to name a few. Most of the time when 'issues' arise its because people haven't diagnosed the problems correctly and are too quickly to blame it on 'oh it must be 'Crossfire/SLI/Vista' I would say if you want a High end card and if the X2 has the performance theres no reason not to go for it.

That isn't a lot of games. From what I've seen, the issues generally come up in games that aren't commonly benchmarked or are a little older. There are also some cases of subtle problems that aren't immediately apparent or that you only encounter halfway through the game.

I don't have experience with Crossfire but I had an SLI setup (7800s) in 2006 and ran into some issue or another in the vast majority of my games at the time, both new and old. This included dysfunctional vsync, performance identical to a single card, wild framerate fluctuations in certain situations, rendering glitches, random CTDs and various other things. I eventually just started using single card mode in many of my games because I was getting tired of wasting a hour with each game, tweaking it and trying to get SLI to work properly with it. I ended up switching to a single X1900 shortly after that. People say that the 7 series SLI was better than the 8 series, so I would be even less inclined to try it again now.

In the case of Crossfire, I'm not sure how fast the compositing engine can output the video signal on recent cards. The original X800 Crossfire had a well publicized problem with this; it was largely fixed with the X1800 Crossfire cards, but it was still a little below what a single card can manage (350mhz as opposed to 400mhz on VGA). I haven't heard anything about it since then. This won't affect most people since there were only two or three monitors (all CRTs) ever made where this would make a difference, but I happen to have one of them and use the max resolution fairly often in older games.

 

[taltamir]

it is interesting that they mention that this appears as a single piece of hardware in windows... But it is still regular crossfire correct? it still uses individualized CF configurations per application. Well, the drivers are really incomplete. But it already shows promise. It lacks the shader power of 2x8800 SLI setup, but it is the fastest "single" card out. So if you have a mobo with just one PCIe port then its the fastest card you can get.

Notice in some newer games it looses to a single 8800GTS. I am assuming that is because it is simply using only one GPU on that one, and needs a driver upgrade to work in dual GPU mode with that game. This is the biggest drawback. Brand new games will always perform worse on a two card setup. As long as AMD is quick with driver deployment then this wouldn't be a big issue though.

Tom's hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/20..._the_rage_fury_maxx_2/

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Demoth

Originally posted by: BFG10K

I want a high end card really badly at this point but have no interest in anything operating on Crossfire or SLI.

Same here. I think the 3870 X2 is important to ATi because it allows them to briefly claim the "single card" performance crown but I'll be staying away from it because I don?t think it?s a robust long term solution.

The 3870 X2 is more then an attempt for a brief performance lead. This card is a natural start to ATI's ultimate goal of a single GPU design with higher end cards having multiple GPUs added. Going this route will ultimately lead to ATI"s manufacturers being able to quickly and cheaply mass produce any iteration of a generation that is in demand.

Multi-core CPUs, for most end users, is only applicable in a few applications and will be game limited for quite a while. Adding GPUs however translates to a theoretical linear increase in performance, limited as of now by Crossfire/SLI being in it's infancy and a few hardware design refinements.

If these reviews show nothing else, it shows ATI is well ahead of Nvidia when it comes to Crossfire.

This first round of cards though I would avoid. Way too much noise and still a high power draw. With some refinement and newer drivers, this card could signal the start of a power shift.

I disagree with the assertion that SLI and CF are in their infancy. SLI is approaching 4 years old and CF is right behind that. Both companies have been through numerous hardware revisions (NV40, G70, G80, G90; R400, R500, R600) in the time to allow themselves to optimize things on the hardware side. And you know what? The implementation still sucks.

It still requires custom profiles, it still varies in performance wildly from game to game. When you add more rendering hardware to a single die you can get returns very close to the theoretical maximum, but this doesn't happen with SLI/CF. Graphical rendering may be embarrassingly parallel but it doesn't scale very well with multiple dice because it can't; there's a massive penalty involved because we don't have cache coherency for data and because otherwise sharing data among GPUs is a very slow process due to the inability to use the kind of fast buses and memory crossbars that GPUs use to access their own memory. Hell, each die needs its own copy of the data. At the end of the day the introduction of pixel shaders is severely impacting the performance of this technology.

So no, this isn't a technology in its infancy, it's just really, really subpar technology. What You See Is What You Get, and what you get is a technology that has to constantly be coddled to perform well. Multiple GPU technology is a gimmick to sell more GPUs, and until the day comes that it's possible to use multiple GPUs without profiles and other game-specific adaptations, it's not a viable way to increase performance across the board.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: Demoth

Originally posted by: BFG10K

I want a high end card really badly at this point but have no interest in anything operating on Crossfire or SLI.

Same here. I think the 3870 X2 is important to ATi because it allows them to briefly claim the "single card" performance crown but I'll be staying away from it because I don?t think it?s a robust long term solution.

The 3870 X2 is more then an attempt for a brief performance lead. This card is a natural start to ATI's ultimate goal of a single GPU design with higher end cards having multiple GPUs added. Going this route will ultimately lead to ATI"s manufacturers being able to quickly and cheaply mass produce any iteration of a generation that is in demand.

Multi-core CPUs, for most end users, is only applicable in a few applications and will be game limited for quite a while. Adding GPUs however translates to a theoretical linear increase in performance, limited as of now by Crossfire/SLI being in it's infancy and a few hardware design refinements.

If these reviews show nothing else, it shows ATI is well ahead of Nvidia when it comes to Crossfire.

This first round of cards though I would avoid. Way too much noise and still a high power draw. With some refinement and newer drivers, this card could signal the start of a power shift.

I disagree with the assertion that SLI and CF are in their infancy. SLI is approaching 4 years old and CF is right behind that. Both companies have been through numerous hardware revisions (NV40, G70, G80, G90; R400, R500, R600) in the time to allow themselves to optimize things on the hardware side. And you know what? The implementation still sucks.

It still requires custom profiles, it still varies in performance wildly from game to game. When you add more rendering hardware to a single die you can get returns very close to the theoretical maximum, but this doesn't happen with SLI/CF. Graphical rendering may be embarrassingly parallel but it doesn't scale very well with multiple dice because it can't; there's a massive penalty involved because we don't have cache coherency for data and because otherwise sharing data among GPUs is a very slow process due to the inability to use the kind of fast buses and memory crossbars that GPUs use to access their own memory. Hell, each die needs its own copy of the data. At the end of the day the introduction of pixel shaders is severely impacting the performance of this technology.

So no, this isn't a technology in its infancy, it's just really, really subpar technology. What You See Is What You Get, and what you get is a technology that has to constantly be coddled to perform well. Multiple GPU technology is a gimmick to sell more GPUs, and until the day comes that it's possible to use multiple GPUs without profiles and other game-specific adaptations, it's not a viable way to increase performance across the board.

Beautiful! ... If you don't mind, I am going to quote that paragraph every time I discuss the demerits of multiple GPU setups with someone.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I'll hang on to my 8800gts 512 which has consistant performance. Thanks for the links.

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: tuteja1986
ATI finally beat a G80 for ultimate performance crown after 1 and half year sad really :!

Anyways now they just need to sell it at $450 and it will be a good seller.

Yeah, but it also happened with nVidia with the FX series, also the GeForce 6 series and even the 7 series after the X19X0 was released.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Puffnstuff
I'll hang on to my 8800gts 512 which has consistant performance. Thanks for the links.

Also what I have... interestingly enough, the 8800GTS 512 beats it in a few games. but usually the X2 comes on top.

 

[ManWithNoName]

More fuel for the fire. Here's an 18 page Tweaktown Review that went up today. I'm really surprised how well the ASUS TOP 8800GTS 512MB did against the HD3870X2 in this review. The Asus TOP is running with a moddest default overclock of 678c/986m ....

http://www.tweaktown.com/revie...ntroduction/index.html

Edit:
Note Tweaktown review uses a PCIe 1.1 P35 motherboard for their test-bed rather than a 2.0.

 

[taltamir]

I have seen a review showing the x2 having huge benefits from PCIe v2...

The P35 chipset doesn't support PCIe v2 does it?

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: taltamir
I have seen a review showing the x2 having huge benefits from PCIe v2...

The P35 chipset doesn't support PCIe v2 does it?

Nope, I think you need X38 (on the Intel side) for PCI-E 2.0. My P35 board has 1.1 slots. Darn, that's depressing. I've only got one 16x slot, and I wanted to plug a 3870 X2 into my P35 board to play with CrossFire w/o changing motherboards.

But...I will wait for a comprehensive review like Anand's before making a decision.

 

[taltamir]

No go for you then... the reviews show that the x2 is twice as fast when connected to a PCIe v2... on v1.1 it is slower then a GTS 512MB in almost every situation.

Seeing as I just ordered a P35 mobo (and an e8400), I guess I will stick with my GTS then...

 

[ManWithNoName]

Originally posted by: taltamir
I have seen a review showing the x2 having huge benefits from PCIe v2...

The P35 chipset doesn't support PCIe v2 does it?

No it doesn't, and I have a PCI-E P35 board as well. I've seen the same reviews with this card on a PCI-E 2.0 motherboard showing a large performance increase. Most people are using PCI-E 1.x motherboards however, so it's something which should be addressed in future reviews in my opinion.

 

[hclarkjr]

one thing i am wondering is why they went with GDDR3 on this and GDDR4 on the 3870?