Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2 Review

After weeks of game-fueled bliss and a handful of competitive releases, I wondered if ATI’s flagship still makes waves. While an HD 3870 X2 is an impressive stretch of hardware, is it really worth its salt? Although, dual-GPU salt’s a little cheaper these days… by about fifty bucks. It’s a $400 card now, which is a hair more than crazy but still shy of preposterous.

So why not just get two 3870s and rub a little CrossFire into your box? There are two reasons, really. For most people, that’s just not an option. Dual-PCI-Express can easily tag a Benjamin onto the price of a motherboard, and, in Micro-ATX land, it’s a mythical beast that visits overclockers in their dreams. And there’s another thing: regular 3870s get the lower-binned GPUs–the faster-clocking chips go into the X2s.

But, lastly, the 3870 promises something else: tri- and quad-CrossFireX. But that begs the initial question: now that the release is behind us, how much awesome stuck to the HD 3870 X2, and how much washed away?

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