R680: AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

Value

The Radeon HD 3870 launched at an MSRP of US$449, which equates to roughly £270 (inc. VAT) by the time you factor in currency conversion, Rip Off Britain and Gordon Brown’s slice of the action, so it’s good to see that PowerColor and Scan have managed to come in under that target price just a day after the card launched. Admittedly, that card isn’t quite available yet, as it’s listed on pre-order, so if you want to buy a Radeon HD 3870 X2 today, you’re looking at a price closer to £300, including VAT.

Looking at the competition to the Radeon HD 3870 X2, the obvious contender is the GeForce 8800 GTX. Point of View’s standard clocked GTX comes in at around £250 including VAT on Ebuyer, which is pretty attractive with all things considered. While the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS 512 OC doesn’t quite match the 3870 X2 for performance in some situations, it does come fairly close to it overall and it’s available for just over £200 on Scan.

Remarkably, despite the fact that the 8800 GTX has shed quite a few pounds in the last few weeks, Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 Ultra remains well above the £400 mark, with the cheapest being Asus’ stock-clocked version at over £420 (inc. VAT). Interestingly though, you’ll remember that some of the faster factory overclocked 8800 GTX cards actually performed on a par with the standard Ultra – one such example of this is BFGTech’s GeForce 8800 GTX OC2, which is priced tentatively at just over £305 – that’s a bargain if you ask me.

That’s all of the single GPU options out of the way, so there’s one more part of the equation and that is where a pair of cheaper 3870 or 8800 GT cards lines up. One of the cheapest available standard clocked 3870 cards is the Gigabyte card which is priced at around £135 including VAT. Double that up and you’re at just over the price of a single Radeon HD 3870 X2 – that makes sense, as you’ll get roughly the same performance across the board as we’ve shown here.

What’s interesting though is that the GeForce 8800 GT’s availability woes appear to have ended and you can now pick up a standard-clocked Inno3D GeForce 8800 GT for just over £150 (inc. VAT). Again, that’s pretty good value and a pair of those is about £35 more expensive than a single 3870 X2. While we didn’t include a direct comparison here, we can safely say that it should perform better than the 3870 X2 in most scenarios.

Final Thoughts...

While the Radeon HD 3870 X2 has the potential to become one of, if not the fastest graphics cards released to date, it’s not something that I can recommend over Nvidia’s current flagship GeForce 8800 Ultra and 8800 GTX cards because it’s only as strong as its weakest link. Sadly for AMD’s graphics product group, that means there’s a long road ahead with driver support for this beast because, even from just looking at current releases, I believe there will be scenarios in the future where CrossFire isn’t as well supported as it probably should be.

There are many ways to look at this and I’m sure the conspiracy theorists are hard at work. Are the developers locking AMD out because they’re working closely with Intel’s and Nvidia’s developer relations teams? Is AMD’s developer relations team helping developers to implement proper CrossFire support? Or is there something else that I’ve missed completely? I honestly don’t know what the situation is, but there are developers which I’ve spoken to in confidence that haven’t heard from AMD for a while.

Ultimately, the long term success of this card is going to come down to AMD’s driver and developer relations teams and how well it gets supported in this year’s crop of new releases. I’m all for faster graphics cards using multiple GPUs, but there needs to be transparency for the gamer to really harness a multi-GPU card’s potential. In the scenarios where the support is there, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 performs very well and it can be looked upon as a match for Nvidia’s now nine-month old GeForce 8800 Ultra, but in the scenarios where there isn’t support, you end up with a card that isn’t even as fast as something that’s nearly half the price.

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