So here we are, knee deep in yet another chapter of the ongoing struggle for graphics supremacy between the red team and the green team. In the past few months, the primary battlefront in this war has shifted away from the traditional slug-fest between ridiculously expensive video cards and into the range between $200 and $300 an unusual development, but a welcome one. NVIDIA has captured the middle to upper end of that price range with the GeForce 8800 GT, a mighty performer whose sole liability was the difficultly of finding one in stock at your online store. Meanwhile, AMD offers a substitute with the Radeon HD 3870, which isn't quite as quick but is still a solid value. - The Tech Report

AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2 Dual-GPU Video Card Review

NVIDIA has held the overall graphics performance crown uninterrupted since the fall of 2006, when it introduced the GeForce 8800 GTX, and the only notable change since then was when the green team added a few additional jewels to its crown and called it the GeForce 8800 Ultra. The folks at AMD have no doubt been fidgeting nervously over the past year waiting for the chance to recapture the performance lead. Frustratingly, no single Radeon GPU would do it, not the Radeon HD 2900 XT, and the Radeon HD 3870 neither. But who says you need a single GPU? This is where the Radeon HD 3870 X2 comes into the picture.

The idea behind the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is simple, to harness the power of two GPU's via a multi-GPU scheme like CrossFire or SLI in order to make a faster single card solution than would otherwise be possible. AMD did this same thing in its last generation with the Radeon HD 2600 X2, but the card never found its way into our labs and was quickly usurped by the Radeon HD 3870. NVIDIA was somewhat more successful with the GeForce 7950 GX2, an odd dual-PCB card that was a key component of its Quad SLI scheme. AMD's pitch for the Radeon HD 3870 X2 sounds pretty good though.

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 should possess many of the Radeon HD 3870's virtues, including DirectX 10.1 support and HD video decode acceleration while packing a heckuva punch. In fact, AMD claims the X2 offers higher performance, superior acoustics, and lower power draw than two Radeon HD 3870 cards in a CrossFire pairing. That should be good enough, for gaming in better than HD resolutions. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 card is every bit as long as a GeForce 8800 Ultra and, in fact is deeper than most motherboards. Unlike regular Radeon HD 3870 cards, the X2 version has only a single CrossFire connector onboard.

The Radeon HD 3870 X2's two GPU's flip bits at a very healthy frequency of 825MHz, which is up 50MHz from the Radeon HD 3870. Each GPU has a 256-bit interface to a 512MB bank of memory. That gives the X2 a total 1GB of memory on the card, but since the memory is split between these two GPU's, the card's effective memory size is still 512MB. The GDDR3 memory runs at 1800MHz, somewhat slower than the 2250MHz fast GDDR4 memory on the single Radeon HD 3870. This arrangement should endow the X2 with more GPU power than a pair of Radeon HD 3870 cards in CrossFire but less total memory bandwidth.

Obviously, AMD has captured the title of fastest single graphics card with the Radeon HD 3870 X2. There is much to like. The X2 is generally faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and it has HD video decode acceleration that NVIDIA's older G80 GPU lacks. In all, the X2 looks to be a pretty good value in a single card, high-end solution at $449. The X2 does draw more power and generate more noise under load than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, but it's not unacceptable on either front for a card in this class. And the X2's seamless multi monitor support is the icing on the cake. We're really pleased to see that working so well.

That said, the X2's title is by no means undisputed. NVIDIA's best alternatives to the X2 are based on the newer G92 GPU and have support for H.264 decode acceleration themselves. For just a little more money, a pair of GeForce 8800 GT cards in SLI will outperform the X2, usually by a healthy margin. Those GeForce 8800 GT's will come with many of the same multi-GPU caveats as the X2, however, plus additional ones about requiring two PCI Express slots and an NVIDIA chipset. If you're hoping to sidestep those worries, one can hardly afford to ignore the value presented by the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB at around $300.

The GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB's performance isn't far from the Radeon HD 3870 X2's in many cases. Unless you really are planning on driving a four megapixel display, a video card like the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB will probably feed your appetite for eye candy quite well in the vast majority of today's games. We do have a new champ today, though, and it's from AMD. Nice to see the title changing hands again, even if it took a dually to do it.