ATi Radeon 3870X2

The year 2007 was a real nightmare for ATi. There cards were slaughtered by their Nvidia counterparts. This year, ATi is making an attempt to better it. Their first attempts this year were HD3850 and HD3870. These cards offered enormous value for money as they performed nearly as good as HD2900XT at half the price and less power consumption. This was mainly due to the 55nm fabrication process. Now, ATi is moving on to the high end category with the launch of HD3870X2 which is basically two HD3870s bridged together on a single PCB much like Nvidia's now ancient 7850GX2. With a massive 1332 million transistors and 640 steam processing units, the X2 is expected to give stiff competition to Nvidia's high end cards.

PEFORMANCE
The card shows pretty decent performance in Crysis at 1024x768 resolution. The 8800GTS 512 MB beats it by a good 9FPS. But as the resolution is scaled up to 2560x1600, it is a shade faster than 8800 Ultra. In Call of Duty 4, at the lower resolutions, the card is a shade better than 8800 Ultra. Scaling up the resolution brings the two cards neck to neck.

VERDICT
The only thing I say about this card is that buy this card only if you have a very large monitor supporting resolutions upto 2560x1600 or if you are an ATi fan(this seems to be the only reason to buy Ati cards nowadays).