ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 Video Card Review

The Test System

The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotefixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. ATI CATALYST 8.1 drivers were used on all the Radeon HD graphics cards. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used.

The Video Cards:

• ATI Radeon HD X2- 1GB (825MHz/1.800GHz GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 3870 – 512MB (777MHz/1.126GHz GDDR4)
• Diamond Radeon HD 3850 – 512MB(669MHz/1.658GHz GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 3850 – 256MB (669MHz/1.658GHz GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 3650 – 256MB (722MHz/1.584GHz GDDR3)
• Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 – 256MB (600MHz/1.000GHz GDDR2)

All of the video cards were tested on the Intel X38 Express Test platform, which is loaded with the latest and greatest hardware. The Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650 ‘Yorkfield’ processor was used for testing as it proved to be the best desktop processor when it comes to game performance. The test system was also loaded with 4GB of memory and water cooled to ensure throttling of the processor or memory wouldn’t cause any issues.

Intel Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model	Live Pricing
Processor	Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650	Click Here
Motherboard	Gigabyte X38-DQ6	Click Here
Memory	4GB OCZ Reaper PC2-6400	Click Here
Video Cards	See Above	Click Here
Hard Drive	Western Digital SATA 250Gb	Click Here
Cooling	Corsair Nautilus 500	Click Here
Power Supply	Corsair HX620W	Click Here
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate	Click Here

Now that we know exactly what the test system is, we can move along to performance numbers.