Let's see, if one Radeon HD 3850 is two-thirds of a GeForce 8800 GTX for one-third the price, then two must be... Yeah, CrossFire and SLI are so interesting to us, though. We know it would make more sense to just spend more money on a really fast card, but two graphics cards. Given that you can definitely get two Radeon HD 3850's for $300, it seems like a reasonable upgrade option, even though we normally rail pretty hard against mid-range multi-GPU configurations. The main weakness of the Radeon HD 3850 is its clean performance drop when anti-aliasing is enabled. Without that, it really does scream. Though will an extra $150 give it that anti-aliasing boost we want to see with CrossFire? - TechLounge

ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB CrossFire Review

The card is about the same size as the Radeon HD 2600 XT, meaning small for enthusiasts though big for everone else. What we've got on the bench is an OEM sample, so it's just the cards. The heatsink has many subtle changes from older single slot coolers, starting with more densly packed fins, a wider fan opening and a much quieter fan with swept edges and therefore not a traditional blower. The base of the heatsink extends towards the front of the card to passively cool the power regulation hardware. The card uses a mix of electrolytic and aluminum capacitors for power regulation.

Again, with anti-aliasing off, these cards did even better than we expected. Unfortunately, things didn't improve as much when anti-aliasing was turned up. It's by no means a shoddy result, but it only makes anti-aliasing playable, and doesn't really future proof the build. Knowing that one card could run at 770/2080MHz, we just set that speed manually for both cards, and had no problems. We might have gotten lucky, because an extra 20% is nothing if not remarkable. Two cards don't add up to the same kind of value. Doubling the cards doesn't make each individual card magically better at anti-aliasing.

The heart of the issue is bandwidth, and with only 256MB of GDDR3 memory, running on a 256-bit bus the limit is the hardware itself. And even though most of the time the second card added about a 30% performance boost, there were plenty of times when it didn't improve things at all. In the Catalyst control center, it's possible to tweak the settings to open up the dual-GPU features that improve anti-aliasing as well as all-around performance, and get some impressive results. Don't get us wrong, it's not a terribly spent $300, especially if you're looking at any number of passively cooled Radeon HD 3870's.

Though overall, they don't beat a GeForce 8800 GTX graphics solution. It's just that it takes a little more tweaking to get the full value of two cards together. Which is, to be fair, greater than two-thirds of a GeForce 8800 GTX but not as much as we would have liked to see from a CrossFire solution.