We're not going to go into too much detail today. The simple fact is that we have a nice big long winded intro for our GeCube Radeon HD 3870 X2 but that is a bit postponed. Though, for some unknown reason AMD decided to delay the release date of the card after they had previously brought the date forward. So it's easy, we have the Radeon HD 3870 X2 in our hands, it's tested and that's probably all that really matters. We're going to have a quick look at the package that MSI have put together, a look over the specifications and then we'll get straight into the benchmarks. And somehow that should already please most of you who are interested in what the fuzz is all about. - TweakTown

MSI Radeon HD 3870 X2 OverClock Graphics Preview

As we have seen for quite a while now, MSI have opted for a larger box design when it comes to their higher end cards on offer and it doesn't get much higher than this for the moment, that's for sure. The front of the box is of course very standard looking. The brand MSI is running across the left side, the model is clearly stated across the bottom and the main features of the card are shown on the right side of the box. We can also see that this particular card is an OC edition. Turning to the back of the box we can see some more details on the card, some information on the power connectors and HDMI adapter.

The card itself is quite long. That's to be expected though considering there's two cores on board. The cooler takes up the whole front of the card and there really isn't much else to it. MSI have of course made the card look like it's from them with some well placed stickers over the card. Turning the card over we can clearly see where the two cores are placed. The memory also sits on the back of the card and the reference cooler design has plates that cover it. We're not really sure if it's necessary or not, but as long as the cooler does a decent job of keeping the card's temperature levels well controlled then that's the main thing.

Moving to the front again we can see we have two power connectors. One is a 6-pin connector while the other is an 8-pin. As we travel across the top of the card we can see the heatsink for the cores extends all the way to the top of the card. Continuing across the top of the card we can see a single CrossFire connector. This is the first time we've seen a single CrossFire connector as opposed to the typical dual design. MSI have decided to spice up their card a little bit. The default clock on the core is 800MHz but MSI have bumped this up to 860MHz. The 1GB of GDDR3 memory though remains at the same 1800MHz effective.

It's not hard to walk away surprised at the end of an AMD based video card article these days. With the boring Catalyst releases of the last few months and generally lagging performance behind its biggest competitor NVIDIA, you don't go in expecting too much. Word is the NDA delay was due to driver issues, and we assume it's probably a performance thing because this is the second Radeon HD 3870 that we have checked and we can honestly say that both haven't skipped a beat when it comes to stability. Performance is what you would probably expect, in a game that manages to take advantage of CrossFire.

So how do you rate a card like that? Well in all honesty we would give the performance portion of the card two thumbs up. This is for a few reasons though. Firstly, when you throw in a game that can make use of CrossFire it flies along. Secondly, this extra power isn't coming at a great cost in all departments, pricing looks positive at the low to mid $525 mark, power draw isn't humongous and noise levels are only ever so slightly elevated. And as you know, CrossFireX should be available soon, we tried to put two cards together and they didn't want to play as the second card just actually sat there doing nothing graphically.

All in all, the card is pretty darn good. How would we make it better? Well as far as the card goes there's not a lot more to do. Sure you could put GDDR4 memory on it and increase the clocks more but ultimately what we need is just better support for CrossFire in games. This isn't a card issue but a software problem which we hope AMD are working on. When you break things down and really look at the card and its unique market segment, it's hard not to be impressed by it.