Introduction
ATI's new Radeon HD 3870 X2 has restored some faith among enthusiasts that the company could produce a decent high-end product that is competitive with NVIDIA's best. Even if it took two Radeon HD 3870 cores to beat the top G80, end-users did not need a CrossFire capable board (just like the GeForce 7950 GX2) and the CrossFire implementation was invisible and hassle free (though we would like the option to disable it when CrossFire stumbles.) Add to that the somewhat competitive pricing which matches the present retail price of a GeForce 8800 GTX and one has the making of a rather decent product.
It ain't a graphics card launch if it was free of controversy and debate however, with the performance of the X2 highly dependent on CrossFire working perfectly and with new drivers made available on ATI's FTP on its launch date that claim to improve performance. Unfortunately, the problem is that we have yet to see significant benchmark improvements on our system with these new drivers. We have also seen some discussions about its PCIe 2.0 status. Reading the fine print on ATI's website quickly clears it up. All Radeon HD 3870 X2 are supposed to be PCIe 2.0 compatible if they follow strictly to ATI's design specifications but the board partners' retail products may not conform fully. Hence, one should check the manufacturer's specifications and box packaging carefully to ensure that it has the proper support.
Of course, this point is moot for us at the moment, since we can't really test this out on our non-PCIe 2.0 test system but regardless of whether it is PCIe 1.1 (as its internal 48-lane PCIe 1.1 PLX switch seems to suggest) or 2.0, we believe that the difference should be minimal. What's more relevant to consumers is that there are quite a few vendors offering the Radeon HD 3870 X2, which is always a good sign of its prospects. Not only that, there are also a couple of interesting, custom boards that includes non standard features. One of these, is GeCube's Radeon HD 3870 X-2 X-Turbo Dual O.C Edition, which besides being slightly overclocked, comes with its X-Turbo Dual cooler with two 75mm fans and quad heatpipes. It even offers four dual-link DVI outputs and a tweaked PCB design. Details after the specifications below:
There's nothing like letting the product sell itself. By prominently showing the dual fan cooler, GeCube is bound to attract the interest of enthusiasts.
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GeCube Radeon HD 3870 X2 X-Turbo Dual Technical Specifications
| Graphics
Engine |
- ATI Radeon HD 3870 GPU
(R680)
- 2 x RV670 (666 million
transistors on 55nm fabrication process)
- Core Clock: 850MHz
- 128 shader units (a
total of 640 stream processing units)
- Ring Bus Memory
Controller
- Fully distributed
design with 512-bit internal ring bus
for memory reads and writes
- Unified Superscalar
Shader Architecture
-
640 stream processing units
- Dynamic load
balancing and resource allocation for
vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
- Common
instruction set and texture unit access
supported for all types of shaders
- Dedicated
branch execution units and texture address
processors
-
128-bit floating point precision for all
operations
-
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
-
Shader instruction and constant caches
-
Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
-
Up to 128 textures per pixel
-
Fully associative multi-level texture cache
design
-
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
-
High resolution texture support (up to 8192
x 8192)
-
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache
designs
-
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
-
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization,
and Fast Z Clear
-
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to
128:1)
-
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
-
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
support
- Physics
processing support
- Full
support for Microsoft DirectX 10.1
-
Shader Model 4.1
-
32-bit floating point texture filtering
-
Indexed cube map arrays
-
Independent blend modes per render target
-
Pixel coverage sample masking
-
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with
shaders
-
Gather4 texture fetching
- Texture
Arrays
- Dynamic Geometry
Acceleration
-
High performance vertex cache
-
Programmable tessellation unit
-
Accelerated geometry shader path for
geometry amplification
-
Memory read/write cache for improved
stream output performance
- Anti-aliasing features
-
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8
samples per pixel)
-
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing
(CFAA) for improved quality
-
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
-
Temporal anti-aliasing
-
Gamma correct
-
Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
-
All anti-aliasing features compatible with
HDR rendering
- Texture filtering
features
-
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive
anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
-
128-bit floating point HDR texture
filtering
-
Bicubic filtering
-
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
-
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
-
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format
support
-
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture
format support
- CrossFireX Multi-GPU
Technology
-
Scale up rendering performance and image
quality with 2, 3 or 4 GPUs
- Integrated
compositing engine
- High
performance dual channel interconnect
-
ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform
-
Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for
H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
- High definition
(HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD
DVD formats
-
Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video
decode acceleration
- Motion
compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine
transform)
-
Avivo Video Post Processor
- Color space
conversion
- Chroma
subsampling format conversion
- Horizontal and
vertical scaling
- Gamma correction
-
High Quality Video Post Processing
- Advanced vector
adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
- De-blocking and
noise reduction filtering
- Detail
enhancement
- Inverse telecine
(2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
- Bad edit
correction
- Two
independent display controllers
- Drive two
displays simultaneously with independent
resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each
display
- Full 30-bit
display processing
- Programmable
piecewise linear gamma correction, color
correction, and color space conversion
- Spatial/temporal
dithering provides 30-bit color
quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
- High quality pre-
and post-scaling engines, with
underscan support for all display outputs
- Content-adaptive
de-flicker filtering for interlaced
displays
- Fast, glitch-free
mode switching
- Hardware cursor
-
HDMI output support
- Supports all
display resolutions up to 1920x1080
- Integrated HD
audio controller with multi-channel
(5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
-
Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder
- Provides high
quality analog TV output
(component/S-video/composite)
- Supports SDTV and
HDTV resolutions
- Underscan and
overscan compensation
-
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and
H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
- Seamless integration
of pixel shaders with video in real
time
- VGA mode support on
all display outputs
- OpenGL 2.0 support
- ATI PowerPlay
-
Advanced power management technology for
optimal performance and power savings
-
Performance-on-Demand
- Constantly
monitors GPU activity,
dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
- Clock
and memory speed throttling
- Voltage
switching
- Dynamic
clock gating
-
Central thermal management – on-chip
sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
|
| Graphics
Memory
|
- 2 x 256-bit
GDDR3 memory interface
- 1GB DDR3 SDRAM
- Memory Clock = 1960MHz
DDR
|
| RAMDAC |
- Dual
integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
- Each supports 18-,
24-, and 30-bit digital displays at
all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600
(dual-link DVI)
- Each includes a
dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip
key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
- Dual
integrated 30-bit per channel 400MHz RAMDACs
-
Each supports analog displays connected by
VGA at all
resolutions up to 2048x1536
|
| I/O Faceplate
Connectors
|
- 2 x DVI-I connectors
(HDCP Support)
- 1 x mini-DIN connector
|
| Drivers &
Software |
- Driver support for
Windows XP/Vista
- Call of Juarez
|
| Other Information
|
- At
least 550W PSU recommended (750W for dual ATI CrossFireX)
- Native
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
|
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