This thing performs better than 8800 Ultra?

what does the FLOPS means?? Is it a technolgy for shader?? Can't see any shader operations around here...

@pk7 In some games it does perform better at this moment. With better drivers it may be better than the 8800 Ultra in all games.

@wyz135 Mike is doing something. I'll ask him about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

floating operation per second

Something decent from ATi.. cheers .
And it's quite cheap aswell :) .

ya the first review was using drivers 7.1 something

we're into driver 8.1 now

the Chinese one seems a bit more accurate, too bad they didn't have a SLI config

Dont worry, when nvidia comes out with the 9800 its gonna own this thing =)

finally it's time for the 8800Ultra's ass to be kicked by ATi

The PricePerformance KING for a good time I hope.

I remember Mike mentioning (or was it Evil Incarnate... not sure, can't remember) that this site would be going over to GFLOPS at some point.

When you use the OCing tool , it reverts back to Shader Operations ( well , it still says GFLOPS , but the number there is based on shader operations ) .

@Radiator Thanks for that. I'll tell Mike.

Wonder how well can it perform when I have 2 of it in a single computer, then total have 4 HD3870s chipsets in a single PC....

hahaha. This is right now the single most powerful graphics card on the market. Not for long if NV has anything to say about it (which they do, 9800GX2 much).

Anyways, I've got someone looking to spend $1500 on a gaming pc. I figured I'll get him one of these.

WTF!!! Look at the Max Power Draw!!! But nothing compared to FireGL V8650

There is no driver support yet for dual 3870x2, I hope they are released soon

some price tag, or a clue for that maybe?

Even if the 9800GX2 beats the HD 3870 X2 , I'd still prefer the X2.. because it's on one PCB , and it performs nicely ... well unless the GX2 is capable of running Crysis at Very High at DX10 , 1680x1050 running at 30 FPS constantly .

I guarantee that this card will be the best price/performance ratio for a long time. This is an awesome solution from AMD

@EgiTheKing According to Hexus:
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=11398&page=12

Your "guarantee" is not worth crap. The 8800 GT , 512MB 8800 GTS, HD 3870 and 8800 GTX get you more performance per dollar in Vista. Had they measured the 8800 GT and 512MB 8800 GTS in XP they would have out scored the HD 3870 X2.

All this fanboy rooting for the "Ultra's ass to get kicked" is really lame. The 3870X2 barely beats it in some games, and beats it by a decent margin in the games that dont matter in regards to huge processing power (Half Life 2, CoH4). FPS doesnt matter over 60.
And after all the Ultra is still a year older. And it just now gets beaten, barely.
I'd like to see how hot it performs comparatively when you get back to XP where the nVidia drivers are optimized to the same degree as the ATI ones. That would highlight hardware more.
And claiming its the single most powerful card on the market is only half true, I mean its honestly two cards smushed together.

The teapot calling the kettle black?

If the X2 retails at almost half the price of the Ultra it is definitely worth it.

yeah but my 2 8800 GT's dominate it!!

"yeah but my 2 8800 GT's dominate it!!" Exactly, this is a 2 GPU card and should be also measured against other 2 GPU solutions. To not include SLI benchmarks in most of these reviews is quite lame.

Please remember that the 3870 X2 has 2 processor cores and the Ultra has processor core. The Ultra still has the strongest single core ever made to date.

how much this monster will cost?and how about the power consumption and the temperature?

Around what the HD 2900 XT cost when it first came out ... that's what it'll cost .
As for the 8800 Ultra...scalar MADD MUL architecture... it has 128 shader processors .
The
HD 3870 has a superscalar MADDx5 architecture... so basically , it has
64 shader processors that can do 5 shader operations per shader
processor in one clock cycle (has 5 ALUs in one shader processor ) ,
but the fifth shader ALU is used for ... special things ( not sure what
exactly ) .
As for the 8800 Ultra , it has 128 MADD processors ( one
ALU per shader processor ) and 128 MUL processors ( MUL not being used
really , though ) . So... basically due to the superscalar
architecture's inefficiency makes the superscalar cards slower than
they theoretically could be . Also , the shader clock is locked to the
core ... so they can't clock them riddiculously high to make up for
it's inefficiencies .

This thing costs 450 USD , while the cheapest 8800 U I could find was being sold at 630 USD .

Bleh.. why did I write this again?

I beleive you can crossfire these so 8800 Ultras SLI would have to go against 3870X2x2.

(2) 8800 ultras are faster than the 3870 X2 hands down, not to mention you have just spent over a grand to do it. For the $400 price point I still think the 3870x2 provides sound performance and with newer drivers has potential to provide even greater performance. I'm sure you've heard it before but I have faith in this card lol. Currently I'm running (2) 2900pro 512's since the price dropped significantly on them, best $270 I've ever spent on my system.

Well for 800 you can have two of these, to where 800 gets you one Ultra.

I got the Extreme PC Diamond Radeon HD3870 X2 Extreme Gamer - MAXXX Edition - 875Mhz Core/1gb1960Mhz DDR3 and it smokes my brother's 8800GTX Ultra based system! OMG, you guys shoulda seen his face when he saw me run crysis 1680X res! He's jaw just dropped to the floor and now he's beggin dad to get him the Extreme card too! I LOVE ATI!

I own an EVGA 8800 Ultra KO with an AMD 6000 X2 and to upgrade again would be a waste of money. My only upgrade is SLI"ing" another 8800 Ultra. For the HD 3870 X2, it is recommended to invest in a quad core processor because the Ultra on my dual core system is about even with my AM2 mobo & procesor. To fully benefit the capabilities of the HD 3870 X2, a quad core processor is recommended. Otherwise you will "bottleneck" with a dual core processor or let alone a single core.

This card is more or less a crossfired 3850, seeing that only memory speeds separate the two cards. Meaning the 3870 has ddr4 and the 3850 has ddr3 but the 3870X2 has a ddr3 setup.

With a good dual core CPU , it wont be bottlenecked badly .

This would be so much more powerful with the CrossFire brigde

WTF!!! If this card run in CrossFire, it can achieve over 1 tera Shader Operations!! That's a lot

but its already doing 1 teraflop. u know, 1TF = 1000GF

Well, at least a Card that can let me change my mind in supporting nvidia and now's ATi is leading in the Market!! Way to go ATi!!!

Too bad the person in the last comment is wrong. Read the article on the front page, it will explain it pretty well. ATI is actually not the market leader -- but they are finally putting up a fight, which is always good for competition.

what this 3870x2 can crossfire?

How is it crossfired 3850's?? Its core runs faster than that of the 3870...

Also, it shouldnt be compared to sli/xfire setups as this is a single card solution. One pci-e slot = single card.

Put it this way, you woudlnt want 2x 4core cpus over a single 8core cpu, would you?

Atm it is performance king trading blows with the ultra. Although I don't think that is fair as ultra doesnt do much over GTX, whereas GTX is like 2/3rds the price of an ultra, even lower on some sites.

Of coarse... 2x ultras would liekly scale better then 4gpu's, however that is assuming you have a crappy nvidia motherboard. Which dont OC well at all. Pretty much all intel boards support xfire so its a good advantage.

Im not a fanboy, I have an 8800GT, but I think this card is a huge success on AMD's part.

If you like benches though the 3870x2 is definitely the way to go lol...

I build a new rig, with QX9650 and 8gb 800MHZ DDR ram with 2x HD 3870x2 and i have to say playing crysis in 1080p res all maxed full AA AF = no prob bring on the frags great cards and with drivers are just gonna get better and better and better.

not to mention that 4way xfire doesnt even work yet, so you are probably still using 2 gpus!

When will ATi STFU on Shader and pump some power in their card's Texture operations?!?

U mean add more texture operations lol, probably never. They try to justify the texture ops by giving more power to shader capability, and in some games is a very good thing. I'm a ATi fan, but there are some things that I think they could've done different

Wonder how the 9800GX2 is gonna compare to this(9series SLI efficiency).

It'l most likely walk all over it. Nvidia gets much better game support then ATI for things like SLI. Not to mention each GPU is incredibly more powerful then each of the ATI ones.

I hope AMD/ATI will get this thing right, they do need to concentrate more on textures. Sure shaders are great, but eventually, the shader will go way beyond the physical textures, and the extra shaders will mean nothing. Hoping for the best, and who knows tri core GPUS? lol

It isnt the performance king. Its only the performance king in canned-fake benchmarks, never in REAL gaming performance tests. As in actually playing the game and recording FPS.

I noticed on ExtremeTech they benchmarked one of these vs. an 8800 GTS 512 and 8800 GTX. This thing DIES at high resolutions and/or with AA and AF at 4x and 16x (respectively). ATI can never make a card which doesn't do that. Or at least not yet.

ONE WORD: DRIVERS!

all the reviews are conducted with catalyst 8.2 and 8.1 . now that the 8.3 is released the performance has increased by leaps and bounds in games like crysis and call of juarez and not mention awesome scalability with CROSSFIRE X. they should have a review using the new drivers

Too bad ATi (Or should I say AMD) messed up on their texture fill rate :/

It's so low compared to Nvidia's cards

which one faster.a single 3870X2 or 3870 Crossfire?

a single 3870x2 in all cases thus far.

I have Sapphire HD3870x2 in crossfire X (two of the X2 card's)

I play all my games @ 1920x1200 but Crysis will not play all very high AA NO WAY it just lags.. i got lastest drivers

QX9650 and 8GB ram DDR2 also have RAID 0 WD raptors

Do you people even realise that the texture operations isn't THAT important... and 30000 per second is more than enough . For ANY game .
As for the G9* cards , you can't count the 64 TMUs on it as traditional TMUs .

Yes.. I am getting in 3DMark: CF 2x Sapphire HD3870 : 14.500 points (2 cards) And the HD3870 is hitting 18k (one card)

Have any new drivers came out that lets the 3870 x2 preform better in crossfire yet?

This card's fan profile makes it rather annoying, spinning up and down quite often.