wow thats scary powerful.

-Scapegoat the Jews.
-Scapegoat the French.
-Start a war.
-Jingle keys.
-Fuse stuff to make it go faster.

Umm...Jingle keys...

Could this be the card to break the dual-core GPU curse?

*shudders at memories of the 7850 x2*

stop looking at me swan.

@uninterested gamer: What the hell does that have to do with this article?

But will it blend? I for one am not going to pay 450+ just to find out.

Man, I know this is for the "Hardcore" but $450 bucks? I had a hard enough time with the $170 bucks for Rock Band. I would love to update/upgrade my PC as I have always been more of a PC gamer, but I can't keep up with these type of prices every couple of years. I'm still rocking a 9800Pro in my rig.

@ballaboy311: "Careful! GPU Dust! Don't breathe this!"

@ballaboy311: The better question is will it run Crysis, or even Assassin's Creed at 30fps or better?

Ati should find a way to lower the manufacturing costs if they want to compete with nVidia. Perhaps this is the most powerful card out there, but it's poor when it comes to price/power value.

@-EDGE-: Better than the 8800 Ultra which retailed at $600 at launch.

Right now the drivers are very immature and the Ultra actually beats the cards in some benchmarks. But, with future driver updates it should pull out ahead. Then again hoping for performance increases on ATI cards has almost become a theme lately. It is basically Crossfire on a card, so it will never reach twice the performance of a single 3870, but because ATI's crossfire scales better than Nvidias SLI it might come close to two 8800GTs in SLI. Also, the GPUs are also clocked more conservatively than it's single GPU counterpart, but expect to see factory overclocked cards by major manufacturers.

BTW, there is this card by Asus which looks like you could beat someone to death with.

@Sportyboard: Are you referring to the 7950 GX 2 which was actually one of the best graphics cards ever made?

The 7900 GX2 was the pants one, noisy and prone to overheating, sold as part of Nvidia's awful Quad SLI setup.

I still have my 9800 Pro. Other than games that require SM 3.0 (Splinter Cell Double Agent I'm looking at you) and Crysis, everything else runs fine.

Eventually when I stop this silly Console phase (I stopped upgrading my pc after I got my wii at launch) I will go back and make my machine into the next Cyberdyne system.

This new card looks promising, especially once machines start to run Crysis at playable settings on a native 24 inch widescreen...

[www.tomshardware.com]

Crysis Benchmarks!

3870 x2- As you have just seen I can run Crysis on Very High non stop.
ULTRA- It wasn't really non stop though, there was this slight...
3870 x2- Shut up!

You probably need a Kilowatt PSU to run it. Somebody, needs to learn that superglueing two video cards together is not the answer to beat Nvidia.

I just bought a second Radeon 3870 HD card to run in Crossfire. Had I known this was coming out so soon, I might have gone this route. Though, of course, I get a little worried about the heat of having two 3870's stacked on a single card. But anyway, the 3870 is a great card, no matter how you run it. I get 30+ fps in Crysis in high settings using a single card. I'm interested to see how my Crossfire setup runs.

@nissan288: crysis doesn't require sm3. i've still radeon 9800 pro and it runs fine.

@-EDGE-:
Sucks being poor huh?
@DSlayer103:
Tomshardware benchmarks are not reliable. Go to Hardocp where they run proper ones. The 8800GTX is still faster at crysis. The 3870 X2 seems like a good card, just nothing special.

LOL @ Luke trying to get technical :p

AMD (now) and Nvidia board rooms - How can we get people to buy more graphics cards?

Lowly peon - Make them buy two for no real reason.

Honestly, currently Crossfire and SLi are really not needed (unless you play at stupidly high resolutions), and as ever Crysis is not a good reason for it either.

People never think of future proofing. Sure, you pay through the nose now, but upgrading for a couple hundred every year seems a bit ridiculous when I can pay a few times that and have the card for easily 5+ years. Of course, this is assuming you want to keep games running quickly, and at high graphics levels.

But I hate how they compare their cards with...their older card. What I'd rather know is how this stacks up against the GeForce 8800's and 9800's without having to go look at the specs of each individually.

Anandtech benchmarked this yesterday with updated drivers. It seems to beat everything short of two 8800GTs in SLI. Draws less power than an 8800GTX when its idle too.

[www.anandtech.com]

And it you believe Extremetech, it runs quiet.

eh kotaku, whatup? that article's from jan. 8th....30 days is like 500 years in internet time. jeez.

@ftgf:
I don't remember saying I was poor, but yes, I'm sure it does.

the performance/price ratio is just in par with 8800GT SLI, not very impressive, IMHO.

why bother? dual gpus will be a valid option once thay merge both cores into one chip, like they do now with dual and quad core cpus. at this price level i can buy 2 hd3860, i do save some money and can reinvest this money a year later in the next, new gpus and sell the old hd3860 to reinvest into new gpus.

I got left behind when they dropped AGP in favor of PCI Express (so they couldn't invent a new format, eh?)

@Grumps: NO! shampo is bettah!

@-EDGE-:

$450 as an entry-level price isn't that bad. I paid almost $600 for my 7800 gtx back near when they were released.

I wish manufacturers would stop putting friggin' faces on their cards, I really do.

@BlahDev: Dude Nvidias 8800 GX / GT w/e is even more expensive than this card and this card will most likely defeat the aforementioned models in most games.

teraflops....what the crap. I want petaflops.

@Strangelove:
Yeah, I might actaully get this when I upgrade.

I hate when anybody advertizes how their machine can break a teraflop. Most useless piece of info.

@ftgf: Always try to provide links whenever possible:

[enthusiast.hardocp.com]

Also, there's nothing wrong with Tomshardware. All old-timers use it and AnandTech as well as HardOCP, Arstechnica and few others. Though HardOCP isn't as a big an influence on the computer community as it used to be (reasons vary).

but how much better does it make the gameplay?

How bout some specs?

Quite a sad affair for (now) AMD. They take over a year to release old tech in pairs, and barely reach the mark that Nvidia hit a long time ago.

8800GTX can be had for the same price at this point, 9 series is right around the corner with new tech, and AMD is just now playing catch up.

PS. $450 for a card is close to enthusiast, fits into the hardcore category. But as Nvidia has shown, $250 is a very acceptable price point, with the 8800GT.

@chewbenator: Ati has a knack of making crappy drivers

Codename: Mr.Floppy

@Tepoz:
You might be right its just that Hardocp does not use canned benchmarks. They benchmark in situations that people will actually find while playing. Thats why there is always such discrepancy with benchmarks between sites. Tomshardware for benchmarks is not considered legit by many.

STill slower than an 8800GTX or Ultra.

And I am sick of the "ATI crappy driver" posts. Hey, come back from 1997. It sucks back then.

@ianken: Actually ATI has pretty crappy drivers still, there Leo Laporte.

@ianken:
Well I don't have an ATI card but I mean isn't that still the general consensus that their drivers still suck? That's just a small issue considering their current cards suck.

Well, this is an interesting way to spend that 'Economic Growth' check when it arrives.

@WoodyNvincible:

You need a 550W PSU to run it.

@ianken:

Faster than the GTX by a good margin, cheaper than the Ultra by almost 150 USD.

This card has the best price/perf out there now.

The 9 series got delayed indefinitely past Feb 13th due to "issues". We're talking about 5-6 months now.

@ftgf:

It takes nVidia 6 months to fix issues in their drivers (that's how often they release them). ATI releases drivers every month and they improve performance and fix bugs in each release.

Trust me, "ATI has crappy drivers" is no longer true.

If you don't use it, don't complain about it.

@ImmortalZ:
I wasn't complaining why would I but inferior products?
Also 6 months for driver releases from nvidia? That is total BS. I have an 8800 and they release quite often. When Crysis was released they had around 5 updates in a month trying to optimize gameplay. So if you don't know what you are talking about "don't complain about it".

@ianken:

Actuall most of the benchmarks agree its faster than a GTX and almost on par with an Ultra, for $200 cheaper

@ftgf:
oops but=buy
My point still stands.

I'd need to build an entirely new rig to make proper use of that thing.

... hm... that's an idea...

Ad Slogan:
"Finally, experience Crysis at full detail for the first time."

Every time I've bought an ATI card, I've regretted it. They can't code a driver to save their lives.

@BlahDev: This card is around $200 dollars cheaper than the 8800 Ultra and is equal to, if not better than, the 8800 Ultra. I think $200 dollars cheaper for the same perfomance is a good deal. In fact, I just ordered one and it should be here tomorrow.

Ofcause they can make it a bit faster than the fastest - raising the price is an inevitable factor as we see.

8800GT 512mb (G92) and 8800GTS 512mb (G92) still whips them all by performance and price