Ati Radeon Hd3870x2 Review And Benchmark

2007 was not a very good year for AMD/ATI in the graphics market but now with the new ATI Radeon HD3870x2 graphic card they are back to the high-end scene.

So let's begin, first thing as always, the Specifications:

Now we move on to the package contents which is a standard one to come:

Package Contents:

- DVI to VGA dongle x2
- DVI to HDMI dongle x1
- HDTV Output cable x1
- Crossfire cable x1
- User Manual
- Driver CD
- Molex to 6-pin PCI-Express adapter x1

Now here are some photos of the card:

Package	Package contents

As you can notice this card needs 2 PCI-Express power connectors and one of them is an 8-pin one. The card will still work with 2x 6-pin PCI-Express connectors but will have ATI overdrive disabled, so you won't be able to overclock.

Now on with the benchmarking. Here are the hardware specifications and software used for it.

Computer Specifications:

Power Supply: Xclio Greatpower 650watts
Motherboard: ABIT Fatality FP-IN9 SLI
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Memory: Team Elite 2gb 800Mhz
Graphic card: ATI Radeon HD3870x2

Note: In all the tests we have the CPU overclocked to 3.6Ghz and Ram to 925Mhz

Software and games used:

Windows XP Professional SP 2
Windows Vista Ultimate
ATI Catalyst 8.2
3DMark 06
Call of Duty 4
Crysis
Unreal Tournament 3
Lost Planet Extreme Condition
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea DX10 benchmark

3DMark 06:

As many of you know 3DMark is a software used to benchmark the computers performance running a series of tests. We did 2 tests with it, one with the CPU and Ram at stock speeds and one with them overclocked  to get these impressive results:

3DMark 06 results with no O/C

3DMark 06 results with O/C

Call of Duty 4:

This was tested using the settings in the screenshot below.

The settings

A screenshot of the graphics and where the FPS was measured

See the results below:

Call of Duty 4 results

Some really good results on CoD 4. Very playable on the highest settings.


Crysis:

Crysis is one of the most demanding games to date and is worth benchmarking. First we installed patch v1.1 to fix some issues that Crysis had. Then the GPU Benchmark which can be found in the main directory of Crysis was run with different quality settings, one with High and another with Very High settings and also the Anti Aliasing was set to off. Here are the results:

Crysis results

Crysis Screenshot

Quite good on high settings but it's unplayable on Very High settings.


Unreal Tournament 3:

For this game the UT3 benchmark utility was used. This is a free application that you can download to benchmark any level in UT3. The level tested was DM-Shangrila with all settings on max (DX10 enabled) and the results are shown below:

Unreal Tournament 3 results

UT 3 screenshot

Some really good results regarding UT3.

Lost Planet Extreme Condition:

For this game we set all the settings to the highest possible and Anti-Aliasing was set to off. In this game we ran at different resolutions than usual because some default resolutions are missing. Here are the results:

Lost Planet results

Lost Planet screenshot

Good results but not very playable on resolutions like 1680x1050 and higher. Let move on to our last benchmark

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea:

This is a DirectX 10 benchmark to test the ability of the graphic card on DirectX 10. The settings where put on high and Anti Aliasing was set to off. Here are the results:

PT Boats results

PT boats screenshot

 Some good results here as well.

The verdict:

Some very good results with the new graphic card from ATI. After some time they are now back to the High End scene.


Until Next Time!