We've been given an indication of the pricing which is going to accompany the new GeForce 8800 GTS. When it came to figuring out what exactly it would compete against in the red corner, we soon after came to the following conclusion. The Radeon HD 3850, but not just one of them, rather two working together in CrossFire. Grab a pair of Radeon HD 3850 cards, stick them into our beloved P35 motherboard and let them go at it. What we have with us today is a pair of GeCube Radeon HD 3850 cards under the new X-Turbo naming scheme. With an increased core and memory clock, and without much of a difference in price these could be the Radeon HD 3850's to pick up. - TweakTown

GeCube Radeon HD 3850 X-Turbo CrossFireX Review

With a pretty good idea of what a GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is going to set you back, for similar money you're able to find yourself with a pair of Radeon HD 3850's. Not only this, but you can grab a pair of pre-overclocked GeCube variants with an even better than standard cooler on them. The GeCube Radeon HD 3850 X-Turbo manages not only to pack some extra speed, but also get an upgrade from 256MB of GDDR3 memory to 512MB, this to match the G92 based GeForce 8800 GTS. Looking at clock speeds, the GeCube offerings come in with a core clock of 725MHz and 1800MHz effective on the memory.

The GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB on the other hand packs a default clock speed of 650MHz with a 1650MHz shader clock to boot. It also runs with a relatively high 1940MHz effective memory clock. Across our normal line up of real world and synthetic benchmarks we will see how a two card CrossFire setup competes against the soon to be released GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB. Where is your money best spent? Since we already have the GeForce 8800 GTS' overclocked results in hand from a previous article, we thought we may as well throw them into the mix as well and see what comes out in the wash.

Deciding which route to go isn't going to be an easy one as both setups offer some pretty good numbers. If you're gaming around the current standard resolutions you're probably better off with the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB as it seems to handle the lower resolutions better. With that said though, if you're gaming around that area you're probably better off with the cheaper GeForce 8800 GT. If you're interested in high resolution gaming we would probably opt for the CrossFire setup as it tends to offer similar performance to the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, if not a little faster in some cases.

With that said though, if you're going to venture into the land of anti-aliasing we would probably suggest the GeForce 8800 GTS. Originally we thought that the power was going to be a drawback for the CrossFire setup, but the power figures between it and the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB are so close to each other that it doesn't really come into the equation. The biggest let down with the Radeon HD 3850 CrossFire setup is the anti-aliasing performance. AMD and the driver team just can't seem to get that side of things right. AMD really need these drivers to be good so they can get over the line.

Both setups tend to be pretty good and it would be hard to say a particular one is better than the other. As we mentioned before though, both setups have their strengths and weaknesses. With OpenGL along with anti-aliasing performance favors the GeForce 8800 GTS while higher resolution gaming and especially games that have the ability to take advantage of a multi card setup tend to favor CrossFire.