[Comparison]HD 3870 Crossfire vs 8800GT SLI
PAGE ONE: intro pic and explanations
PAGE TWO: 8800GT SLI vs. single
PAGE THREE: HD 3870 Crossfire vs. single
PAGE FOUR: 8800GT SLI vs. HD 3870 Crossfire
PAGE FIVE: power cosumption & final thoughts
Power Cosumption
Final thoughts
in more than 90% items, Crossfire scales more better than SLI. In 60% test items CrossFire scale up more than 50% performance compare to single card. But, in SLI’s side, it can only scale 40% items up to 50%.
More surprisingly, in 30% items there’s more than 80% scale in Crossfire. But we can hardly find a 70% scale in SLI solutions. In one word to sum this up: ATi’s Crossfire is more efficiency than SLI.
It is known that HD 3870 is not powerful compare to 8800GT. and because 3870 and 8800GT are at the same price, so a single 3870 have no advantage compare to 8800GT. But Crossfire, this funtion somehow add more value to the product. Also there are lot’s of middle and high end mobo (P965, P35, X38… and AMD’s own mobo) supports Crossfire, But only NV’s chipset supports SLI so in multicard solution AMD already got enough firepower to fight with NV.
HD 3870 CrossFire or 8800GT SLI? This is a hard choice. How you choose? please leave your opinion in the comments.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I’d go with the 3870′s in CF as you can keep a decent chipset (P35/X38 etc) for big overclocks whilst still having excellent gfx performance.
The 3870′s are cheaper than the 88gt, draw less power and have a higher IQ, and once more stock is available price gouging will stop and the 38′s making them even more attractive.
I’m selling my 88GT to get two of these…
November 27th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I’ll buy two 3870′s as soon as I can find them on stock somewhere. Great value! And looks cool
November 27th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
newegg.com has plenty of 3870s last time i looked.
2 of them will run you 360 in the us. 2 gts will cost at least 525.
November 28th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Good review, but where are the Crysis scores?
Only reason I would consider a Crossfire or SLI setup is to play Crysis at good framerates.
November 28th, 2007 at 1:32 am
Crossfire is suprisingly more efficient that SLI. Thats good news for AMD. Also you can get a 3870 for $220-$230, and the GT sells for around $250-300. So for a multi-gpu setup, crossfire is the right choice.
Also, whats with the engrish in this review?
November 28th, 2007 at 1:37 am
ed19 perhaps you need to recheck your facts instead of spurting them out. This website has their internal clock wrong also. As of 11.27.07 12:37pm the cheapest HD3870 is $270 and they are all sold out.
November 28th, 2007 at 1:54 am
Crysis test will restart again ,because of the socre issue,we need to check again and again, please wait
November 28th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Damn! I’m shocked at the crossfire performance and to be honest when your talking high-res gaming there’s only one choice…. Crossfire going by these resaults!
BRING ON THE QUADFIRE!!!!!!!!!
November 28th, 2007 at 2:38 am
What I want to know is…
how much did AMD pay the people doing these benchmarks?
November 28th, 2007 at 2:44 am
All I want to know is, where did you get your basis for your accusation and where are your benchmarks countering the ones found here.
My nVidiot sense is tingling.
No, im not an ATI fanboi, i currently run a 8800 GTS 640 which ill be trading in for 2 3870′s
November 28th, 2007 at 2:45 am
@ irenicus: u will never find it out.. dumbass
November 28th, 2007 at 2:50 am
I suppose I would go for the AMD/ATI product if a single slot dual chip card was available. I’ve a decent system that could drive the card but the system is SFF and has only a single 16x PCI-E slot.
Anybody know if ATI’s Linux drivers still suck?
November 28th, 2007 at 3:00 am
Noone cares .. linux is for far fucks living in basements.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:00 am
Well your wishes are granted clause@hotmail the 3870X2 is supposed to be out in jan or feb of 08 crossfire on a single card
and as far as Linux goes they open sourced the info so that they can be built from the ground up
November 28th, 2007 at 3:03 am
Heh, how are these results so different than every other web site’s? I won’t accuse anyone, but all one has to do is hit another hardware site and see that the 8800gt smokes the 3870 nearly everytime. And I am not talking about 3dMark as we all know how “useful” that benchmark is…
November 28th, 2007 at 3:13 am
OblivionLord you turd. Neweggay is not the only place where people shop, Dell has HD3870 on sale for $223 and they are in stock too. Good luck finding 8800GT in stock below 270. Dumbass check your facts before posting.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Hey lightningIII, thanks for the info, I’ll watch for it. And it’s good to hear about the driver.
Hey, “..”! I’m slim, trim, and I use Linux in the office and the server room! At home I use Windows somewhat but that is only because there are few decent games ported to Linux.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:17 am
cus its in crossfire mode dude , as you can see 3870cf owned 8800GTsli!
November 28th, 2007 at 3:22 am
lawls @ window retards, spend some time with a mature operating system that doesn’t crash because it got a booboo. I have always used linux for security and performance and I always will. Windows is nothing more than a toy for gaming.
Does anyone else notice how much performance the 3870 drops when AA is turned on?
November 28th, 2007 at 3:58 am
8800G is better than the HD3870XT? Could you repeat the test please?
you can have 900MHz core clock with a BIOS update
November 28th, 2007 at 3:59 am
“Good luck finding 8800GT in stock below 270. Dumbass check your facts before posting.”
Dell, right now, MSI 8800gt instock, $208.
Crossfire scales pretty awesome, but it seems like the over all outcome is fairly equal. i.e. 1 card scales from 60 fps to 100 fps, vs the other scaling from 50fps to 100 fps. Sure it sounds like a large % to scale up, but in the end, both cards scale up to 100 fps.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:11 am
Nonsense, why are we talking about these irrelevant cards, when the 3DFX voodoo blows them all away.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Hmmm…very nice CF performance!
Still I wonder how would that tests look like with 780i SLI mobo that supports PCIE 2.0 – in this test CF has adventage…
November 28th, 2007 at 4:32 am
It does look like AMD/ATI finally got xfire together – but I’m disappointed that the AA/AF numbers are still so bad – why would anyone accuse the author of being an ATI fanboy for posting numbers like that?
Single or dual card, if you want to run AA/AF nvidia is the clear winner. For an affordable dual card setup, ATI finally has gotten it together.
Still looks like neither setup is going to get decent framerates in Crysis though.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:03 am
Both of you are dead wrong in regards to Dell.
I talked to dells electronic department in their online chat and they informed me that they have neither the HD3870 or the 8800GT.
He told me the 3870 is on back order 1 to 2 weeks and he hasn’t a clue to when they will be getting any 8800GT’s
November 28th, 2007 at 5:10 am
Nice benchmarks, thanks
I don’t quite see why there are so many people throwing a fuss about which card is faster or better. It doesn’t really matter which one you get because both deliver great performance for the money they cost. If both were equally priced and equally available, then the 8800gt would ‘obviously’ be the better purchase; however, even then there can be something said for the 3870 as it supposedly runs more silent, blows the hot air out of the case (some people care for that) and consumes less power, which can add up to a nice amount in a year if you run your PC a significant amount of hours. Whichever you get, you’ll get good performance from either card. To top if off, for 400-500 currency units you get sli/crossfire performance that costs less but performs better than the current top of the line single card solutions, provided the games you play have adequate dual card support. 3870 or 8800gt, seems like a win-win situation to me 
November 28th, 2007 at 5:36 am
bob, u’re absolutely right about voodoos. ati is just preparing to launch dual gpu card but 3dfx has done nearly a decade ago with voodoo5. and its still the fastest card around.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:52 am
For those who are interested Bestbuy.com just put a batch of 3870′s for sale for 215 bucks
I ordered two
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8636666&type=product&id=1194053242087
November 28th, 2007 at 5:58 am
Better IQ JBD? They are equal at best but the GT still has a slight edge on ATI offerings and offers better performance.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:01 am
here is a link to some xFire and Crysis benchmarks…
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/3870-XXX/cfgood.php
November 28th, 2007 at 6:24 am
I like linux, i run it on my laptop and one of my desktops, but seriously, its not as stable or function-filled as you’d think. Upon booting up his computer with linux installed that he had been using for months, he got the message “Shell not found, Kernel not found, Deleting Shell, Deleting Kernel” leaving his computer useless.
I don’t know what’s up with these results, but every other test i’ve seen has the 8800GT coming out on top. Plus, it’s not fair to put an X38 MB against an Nvidia 680i, no wonder the power consumption is so different.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:29 am
John the 3870 is slightly better tbh. The only time it really loses out is on the lost planet demo, which i believe nvida brought out specific driver update for.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:36 am
thanks for posting this article and thanks to all the post.
http://www.floors4u.net
November 28th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Really interesting results! I just wish P35 had two PCI-e X16 slots!
November 28th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Guys, the figures shown here are not so hard to classify.
Both solutions share fairly balanced results, if only generic “test numbers” are considered. But I’d like to know, who of you is interested in getting 12420 frames per second instead of 12410? I mean, for today needs, I really don’t consider the results at 1600×1200 with no filters, for example. I’m interested in the heaviest tests, for a Crossfire/SLI solution: so I look at the highest resolutions WITH filters applied (I hope you’ll desire some pretty strong anisotropic and antialiasing filtering, after a $300-400 expense).
What I see, is that nVIDIA manages them better, and this means that, for today’s needs, the solution which fits best in a hi-end context is the nVIDIA SLI one.
Within months, when applications will have become even heavier, and a HD3870 owner will have to say goodbye to his filtering, maybe a 8800GT owner will still be totally enjoying his graphic setup.
Plus, the single 8800GT is faster than the single HD3870, and this is good too, because we don’t all have tons of money to waste at one time; personally I’d prefer to start with one, enjoy that one, and start saving money for the next one. So, for me and the ones like me, the single 8800GT performance is surely a good thing. SLI “efficiency” is less relevant, if the final result is the same.
The PROs of ATI solution are the following: less power consumption (means less heat, especially good for a two-cards-one-on-each-other solution) and cheaper than the other one. Surely good things, both.
About the price, we definitely should wait a bit and see if nVIDIA will keep up with its promise: a 150$ 8800GT. For what I know, it should be manufactured by XFX and be equipped with 256 MB of memory. Even if this could be a bottleneck for single cards solutions, 512 megs total with an SLI could be perfect for lots of today’s games/apps. If this were true, we would have the 8800GT SLI performance for a strikingly nice $300 expense.
Personally, I’m waiting.
Giacomo
November 28th, 2007 at 7:59 am
[...] these.. but i found em! Sources: 双卡火拼！HD3870 CF vs 8800GT SLI – 评测报告 – 超能网 Expreview.com – Extra Hardware News Report!
November 28th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Well, the power consumption measurements look dubious to me somehow. Adding a second HD 3870 only adds 29 watts… Either the card is very efficient, or there is a problem somewhere in the test!
November 28th, 2007 at 9:42 am
well the 3870 single or cf is a great deal at 219 or less but , with limited availability the price gouging has begun (newegg @269.00). So untill the price comes closer to MSRP for the 3870 the 8800GT is the clear winner.
November 28th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Nice review, but why wasn’t a c2q used? It would have fed more to the graphics cards.
November 28th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
“Hi, my name is Paul, and I’d like to demonstrate that I didn’t read the article before complaining about the benchmarks, thanks!”
Specs – Core 2 Q6600 @ 333×9
A Core 2 Q6600 is a Quad.
November 28th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
ATI driver was updated to Catalist 07.11, most review on the other websites were using catalist 7.10, they need to update the driver then benchmark it again to see some comparizon… IMO
November 28th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Hey, I see that expreview got a cash infusion from Doug Friedman from Amtech research.
Judging from this review, I see that they omitted the only benchmark that matters: Crysis. Letś face it, Crysis, maybe Hellgate London are the only games that matters.
I am surprised by the Crossfire scaling. But the scaling can be attributed to Crossfire having dual bridges verses 8800GT´s single SLI bridge(having double the bandwidth going between the two cards).
November 28th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Oh, one more thing regarding bandwidth: you are comparing 680i chipset(PCI-Express 1) and Intel X38 chispet(PCI-Express 2.0)
So the crossfire platform benefits from a better memory controller on the X38 than 680i, twice the bandwidth from PCI-E 2.0 vs the PCI-E 1.0 slots on the 680i chipset, and twice the crossfire bridges compared to 8800GTś single bridge.
If you are going to do a scaling article, you should wait for the 780i chipset with PCI-Express 2.0 and Dual 8800GTX for two bridges between the cards.(granted, the 8800GTX cost more, but I am sure Nvidia will come out with a dual bridge version of 8800GT for triple SLI)
November 28th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
if NVIDIA can push their 780i, we would like test it again.
why X38 not P35,because of X38 have 2X X16 CF.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
@ philip:
780i from ASUS is ready for sale in a week. Don´t get me wrong, I am merely suggesting that your scaling article is flawed from the start by comparing two different generation of PCI-Express interconnect. Also, your benchmarks are missing the bad and the ugly parts about Crossfire:
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/3870-XXX/cfbad.php
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/3870-XXX/cfugly.php
Why didn´t you mention that Crossfire does not work with OpenGL games. Or crossfire can be slower than single cards in some games. Or more importantly, AFR can only render 3 frames ahead in Vista which means, there is no point for quad Crossfire in the first place unless AMD can pay off Microsoft to enable more than 3 frames limitation in DX10.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Nice to see this test, although I’m currently running nVidia on both my laptop and desktop I know my next purchase is going to be an ATI GFX card.
Oh and btw for the twice over lobotomy victim that says that linux is for f#$ks living in their parents basement I wonder how much of the software on your system is legal… remember if your going vista… which all windows users will eventually have to one day, resistance is futile… remember that all your system are belong to us.
There is a reason why linux is gaining some interest by more and more these days. There will always be tin foiled hat programmers out there that will check the code and verify that it does what it is supposed to. Vista’s EULA state specifically that they collect information and will pass it on if violators are found using illegal/pirated materials (check http://news.softpedia.com/news/Forget-about-the-WGA-20-Windows-Vista-Features-and-Services-Harvest-User-Data-for-Microsoft-58752.shtml) to whom it may concern.
XP does this to a certain extent but hey I stopped using Windows altogether and no longer worry ever about anything on my system. I do miss some gaming aspects but hey if enough use it guess what, the game companies will develop for it. Cudos to ID/Splash Damage, Epic, Wine and cedega for their efforts. I still enjoy many titles that I played on windows.
As for the question about ATI’s driver sucking, unfortunately yes they still have some problems mostly around memory leaks but are full hardware support now though. AMD/ATI has worked very hard getting full hardware support on linux platform and I’m sure they will be there soon.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
How can Crossfire scale more than a 100 per cent? Isn’t that impossible? That means that the additional card will run faster than a single card. The power measurements are also up the wall, as has been mentioned before. This review has no value what so ever.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
yes,sometimes CF can have over 100% improve,that’s what the test showed.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
NICE REVIEW
November 28th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
lol.Still not sure about the bench results.
Where are Crysis?
November 28th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
There are problems with posting. I cannot post my full message.
November 28th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
what the hell? I’ve seen large post that where accepted ok. The rerver does not allow me to copy paste another message nor to post the error message.
November 28th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Method Not Implemented
,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 to /index.html not supported. what’s that?
November 28th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
philip can you give me an email so i can send you my post and then you post it for me? jesus chirst this forum engine sucks big time.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
to psoload
please try again,why you can leave the messsage but cannot post what you want to say,if still error, send to philip@expreview.com
November 28th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Hi everybody…. I’D LIKE TO WORK IN A PERFECT SILENCE, so wich is the best?
November 28th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
To peter,
88GT/ HD3800 VGA Card stock cooler is fine,but if you want a perfect silence,should be upgrade the cooler,like HR-03GT for 8800GT,or other choice.
first of all, choice your VGA card. everything up to it.
November 28th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
@ psoload,
i tried, also have this problem. the network is too slow so it even lost connection
with the site..try using a proxy or just break it into several part and reply multiple times.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:13 am
[...] permalink Nice comparison between HD3870 Crossfire & 8800GT SLI Expreview.com – Extra Hardware News Report!
November 29th, 2007 at 1:37 am
NV Pe4ki!
November 29th, 2007 at 2:26 am
THIS IS FOR THE NVIDIOT DOUG FRIEDMAN CHECK OUT DX10.1 INCREASES THE 3 FRAME LIMIT
OOOH AND NEXT YEAR WHEN THEY REALLY START USING THE GLOBAL ILUMINATION ENGINE IT MIGHT MATER WHERE AS YOU CAN QUAD FIRE THE 3870 THE GT WILL ONLY GET TO SLI ONLY THE GTX & ULTRA WILL TRI-SLI
November 29th, 2007 at 6:51 am
Mike, the 8800GT is better tbh, not the 3870.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Hate to be the bringer of bad news guy’s but you really should all check this test at Driverheaven. I was really pumped up after reading the test here at expreview until is checked the other test. It shows that in some games Crossfire does give a really good increase in performance, in alot of othergames it’s actually way slower and causes image issues. Also Ati’s HD38 series is notably slower in Crysis then Nvidia’s 8800 series. Check it out: http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/3870-XXX/cfgood.php
November 29th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Back to lightning aka AMD Droid the Third:
Where is DX10.1? Last I heard it will come with Vista SP1 which is not going to be out for 3-6 months. Under DX10, the 3 frame limit exists. So yes, ATI’s advertised Quad Crossfire functionality is DOA until they release their planned driver in Jan, 2008 and when Microsoft can patch up their triple buffering limit of DirectX 10.0
BTW, lightning III, typing in all caps makes you look stupid. I used to have clusters of AMD machines back in the Opteron hay days…now I regret that decision.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
anyone who believes this shud go on ahead and crap on his own head
this is pure and plain pathetic shit that i have yet found
even 3870 in cf hardly comes close to 1 8800gt and here its shown even sli loses by big chunk
purely pathetic and big lie to promote ati cards
maybe this reviewer obtained loads from ati
November 30th, 2007 at 1:04 am
philip i send you my message, please post it once you get the chance. something fishy is going on with my computers!
November 30th, 2007 at 1:14 am
Ok. Interesting review. ATI fanboy here.:P Although i will not start cursing nvidia. I deeply respect them for releasing good products and giving ATI a hard time forcing them to evolve.That applies the other way around of course, since if ati hadn’t released those good (but not great) products (3870/3850) at those admittedly great prices, nvidia may as well be asking much more money for the GT. like the totally unacceptable 520 euros i was forced to pay for the god damned GTX which ironically is now matched and/or beaten by its smaller brother the 8800GT. Also don’t forget that most games come with “nvidia the way it was meant to be played”. Kudos to nvidia for that and shit to ATI but considering that most games come with nvidia optimisations ATI performs too well actually. As for crysis , crytek can shove it. They were saying it would run at 60fps on a Q6600 with a single gtx and you saw the results. What they released is actually a single core game. Kudos to Epic for their UT3 engine.
That’s competition people anyway and its good for us. I prefered ATI since the 7500, for their innovation and their nationality plus the programmer of their demos ALEX VLACHOS who is greek like me
. I preferred my money to go to Canada than USA but now ATI is bought out from AMD so its all the same to me. You see for some people, there can be political reasons as well. Let’s not forget though, that Intel’s GPUs are coming but they are still just a little bit away.
To the bottom line the performance/price ratio is the same for both companies now but anyway i will wait for a crossfire r680 solution in january. I believe that this will really kick some serious ass and if ati manages to keep the r680 card at 350-380 euros they will have an absolute winner. As for vista not permiting no more than 3 ahead frame rendering as a guy above said, I don’t give a shit. I run my games on xp. I also do agree that intels chipset are far better and more stable than nvidias plus more energy efficient and I really believe nvidia sealed their grave by not permitting intel to release sli compatible chipsets. That’s why they are going to kick their ass too. Pity though.
The one thing i’m curious though is the X38 2×16 slot plus pcie 2.0 capabilities. I also read some people saying that the 680i comparison against X38 is unfair. I wonder if that is true since as far as i know the bus is only used to send geometry data after the cards have been fed with textures. I mean that they don’t use the bus speed to render graphincs in the main ram so what’s the big deal? Also we are talking for GBs of throuput here so if you have 4GBs vs 8GBs whats the point? All this brings up memories of the AGP8X vs AGP4x which had no performance gain. All this would have a striking difference for a graphics card with 64 or 128MB of memory in a scenario that it was requested to render a high resolution image, thus resulting in the use of main system memory. Am i right or wrong here guys? Also could someone direct me to a P965 vs P35 vs X38 crossfire review that would show these differences among the chipsets? All I could find was 975X vs P35 and guess what, 975x kicked P35 ass! Thanks.
November 30th, 2007 at 1:17 am
to philip : please don’t post my message. I posted it myself.I found the problem. It was google web accelerator. I uninstalled and everything is ok now. As it seems, I could NOT post to any forum or use any online email service, even google’s own gmail. Heheh. Byebye google web accelerator.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:18 am
“Dell has HD3870 on sale for $223 and they are in stock too.”
Funny you should say that. As an informed consumer, I personally called Dell a few days ago to check SPECIFICALLY if ‘IN-Stock’ was a correct assumption seeing as dell doesn’t post status of Stock availability on their website. Dell WILL NOT answer the question directly that they have them ‘in-stock’ they will simply say that you will have the item in 10 to 14 days. This is NOT the same thing as having them in-stock. Furthermore, they also claimed that if you were to purchase now, you’ll still be waiting 10 – 14 days before receiving. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t trust ordering anything ‘acappella’ (or otherwise for that matter) from Dell, especially seeing as how evasive they were to my (a Consumer) queries.
” Dumbass check your facts before posting.” –aptly stated, perhaps this time you should follow your own advice?
November 30th, 2007 at 4:43 am
WOW what a big dissapointment, I only wish I saw this review before buying a 2nd 8800gt card. @home 3dbench reporting 11k single and 14K for dual card. I was expecting more like 19K. All along I thought it was my el chepo m2n4-sli at fault with the low scores. I guess a better mobo is also pointless. Guess I’ll have to suffer through crysis on medium & low settings after all.
November 30th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Hellgate london was shit. end of story.
crysis is the only REAL gfx test in DX10, they should have included it.
SLI 8800GT would probably only get 10FPS in DX10 very high, same with HD3870.
Hell, 8800Ultras SLI only got under 20fps.
November 30th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Crysis has problems with SLI/Crossfire. That’s probably why they don’t include it. Crysis needs a patch to work well with Crossfire.
November 30th, 2007 at 9:24 am
@ Todd
O_o 8800GT paired in SLI = Crysis in Medium or Low settings???
Are you serious about that claim?
November 30th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Will this be able to play crysis in very high with 25-30fps?
November 30th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
@ Todd:
8800GTs paired in SLI will give you about 30fps in Very High. Now some people prefer to play at 60fps, so they will play in Medium or Low. But if 8800GT SLI can only run at low, then Crossfire will crash so you get 0fps from the red team.
I am very disappointed by the recent AMD “paid” pumpage of Radeon HD3870 which is basically a shrink of the same old X2900XT. More disappointed at the people who are paid to stretch half-truths. BTW, I am not paid to post this unlike the reviewers.
November 30th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
@Doug Friedman
actually both AMD and NVIDIA are paid in this comparison. if they dont pay all game will only run in 1X fps @ low setting, only Intel’s IGP mobo can have a 60FPS in every DX10 game.
choose your word wisely. why those big shots will paid a small site like this? Exp even not pass the first birthday and don have any influence..
just borrow 4 card and try it. anyway why we should trust you ? you did not have any proof that you are not paid.
but we got lot’s of proof that we are not in the big shot’s paid roll.
do i need to show you?
i’ve seem you pervious post here. Yes we got lots of problem in our reviews, and thanks for your pointing out. we’ve learn a lot in you post and will discuess this issue internally.
November 30th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
@ tigen
no…
actually with 8800GTX SLI we find a 20% boost in Crysis demo
http://en.expreview.com/?p=19
but when we have this comparison we find not any boost in SLI/CF..can not find the answer so we just drop the game.
November 30th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
To Jeff and philip and all the other guys who run this site i would like to say don’t give a shit about all those stupid fucks that say you are paid. Of course you are a small site and amd would not pay any attention to you. Ooops that did not come out right.
I mean you are a small site and it’s good for trying. And your tries and reviews are valuable. DON’T STOP and i personally thank once again for the review.
As for crysis i said it before and i will say it again. CRYSIS SUCKS BIG TIME. I shit on the programmers faces.
November 30th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I say only one thing: Crossfire HD3870 and a 790FX chipset.
790FX is the best overclocking chipset I can think of as a regular heatspreader for it is just overkill as it generates as little heat as it consumes power, which is virtually none.
November 30th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
lol so funny to see a bunch of virgin geeks arguing over ATI and NVidia
November 30th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Get off the computer and go fuck a chick already ‘geekdestroyer’
November 30th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
To mr.borka.
I guess what you mean my friend is a 790fx with quad crossfire with 3870 right? That would be oh yes so sweet. But 790fx is for AMD cpus only. Although Phenom came to make the gap with intel smaller and it is a quit good cpu, it is not as good as intels offerings.And the penryns are here with more and cheaper models to come. I really regret for saying that since not only am i an ATI fanboy i am also an AMD fanboy. Imagine my happyness when the AMD/ATI merging occured but imagine also my sorrow since amd decided they are happy being SECOND. And if they continue like this they will end up THIRD when Intel releases their GPUs.
No no no i’m not going for 790fx although its really high quality. I will stay with intel and i will wait for the R680 so i will be able to have four chips rendering like crazy but on an intel chipset. Good move for amd though. I just wish they don’t make anything utterly completely hellishly stupid and lock the four chip rendering for their 790 series only. That will be the seal to their graves as much nvidias forbidding sli to intel. If you sirs at AMD do not have the cpu power to backup your GPUs then don’t do anything that stupid.
Actually even if you had this power you should either. Pc is about open architecture. And there is nothing open if nvidia must give their permission to intel or ati for chipsets. That holds true for the other motherfuckers too. So what i have to say TO ALL OF THEM is stop BEING JERKS and don’t lock your technologies to each other or we will end up having military camps like INTEL cpu/INTEL gpu AMD cpu/AMD gpu And finally nvidia alone in the dark with their custom chipsets and gpus. DON’T FUCK UP the pc industry people. I hate to say it but in the bottom line, if it wasn’t for microsoft we would have already ended up with three pcs each, as per the specifications above which would of course be incompatible with each other. (gosh, i typed something good about M$, now i have to wash my hands with acid to cleanse them
)
Nvidia started it and SLI should be banned. I wonder why the commission let it out in the first place.
December 1st, 2007 at 8:50 am
is it safe? or is it even nigz0rs proof?
December 1st, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Well clearly we need more comparisons then just two sites, but it’s pretty amusing to see the Nvfanboy damage control..
The driverHeaven reviews in my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt right now, looking at Quake Wars tells you exactly why, expreview shows Quake Wars gaining a massive
75% at 16 by 12 and 19 by 12 at 4xAA
While what does DriverHeaven say? Crossfire is broke for OpenGL games?
This obviously proves that something wasn’t right with the DriverHeaven setup, either an outdated driver, BIOS or something was bogging down the Crossfire and perhaps even the ATI cards in general….
Though I guess Nvidia fans could argue Expreviews setup is working due to witchcraft lmao.
Furthermore DriverHeaven did a piss poor Crysis test, I mean lmao they tested the DX10 Vista version of Crysis on Very High and not the XP hacked version which looks the same and has been proven to run far better.
Who knows maybe the DX9 hacked version would have put it more in ATI’s favor?
The last glaring thing the Nvidia fanboys will hate me for pointing out is DriverHeavens Crysis screenshots, now between all the games listed their comment saying all of these mostly look the same is true.
Except for the very first two screens! Look at the distant mountain in the Crysis screens in both the Nvidia and ATI shot, the Nvidia mountain looks super blurry while the ATI is crystal crisp.
Now I know Nvidia’s latest driver update was for Crysis so perhaps they tuned something so that their cards would have to render far less as they clearly are judging from the screenshot, no this isn’t apparent anywhere else in the other screens, but perhaps Nvidia found a good tweak that gives a massive increase in exchange for a few uglier moments like the distant mountain.
All in all that screenshot proved that the ATI cards were clearly doing more work so it’s not really a fair comparison to look at the frame rates right now.
Yes it is just in one spot, but it’s a huge difference in that spot really night and day.
I’d end this with saying I’d really like to see crossfire vs SLI comparisons using the proven better performance of the Crysis hacked XP version since a friend of myn with a Q6600 and 2 3870′s told me at 1400 by 900 he could run Crysis on very high averaging a massive 40 frames a second. Those numbers sound outstanding on their own and from what I’ve heard from people that are SLIing Crysis and sporting the DX 9 hack it seems to me the DX9 hack version benefits the ATI cards much more drastically over the 8800′s
December 1st, 2007 at 4:40 pm
OUCH look what I just found!! http://72.14.203.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2007/test_ati_radeon_hd_3870_rv670/28/&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2007/test_ati_radeon_hd_3870_rv670/13/%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2007/test_ati_radeon_hd_3870_rv670/28//artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2007/test_ati_radeon_hd_3870_rv670/21//artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2007/test_ati_radeon_hd_3870_rv670/28/
We all know looking at the card specifications the 3870 has far more impressive numbers then the 8800GT so were do those numbers find a use exactly? It seems the link above has the answer, the 8800GT completely falls apart when 8x AA is reached! I mean it’s abysmal, it puts it far behind the 3870!
I was wondering why we’ve seen no use of 8xAA with this very powerful cards, call me crazy, but maybe just maybe Nvidia stressed to reviewers not to test 8xAA or maybe its just a coincidence that it seems none of the 8800GT reviews test 8xAA
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:48 pm
@Jeff:
It is nice to see you recognize the fact that both Nvidia and ATI pay review sites to review their product. However, in this case, it is blatantly obvious that ATI paid you a lot. The relative young age of expreview is irrelevant at this point, because it is clear to some clever viewers that expreview definitely got deep industry tries to be able to get such hardware first, before the United States review sites even know the parts existed.(for example your HD3870s when itś still hard to get, and the Intel Wolfdale processors 45nm parts).
According to another site, Crossfire scaling is not even close to your results of 105% in 3dmark(can a proper review give you 105% scaling and only 20W more for power when we know that HD3870 uses 105W?)
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/diamond_viper_hd3850_crossfire/12.htm
According to overclockersclub, which used Crossfire HD3850s, scaling in 3dmark is about 30-50%, which directly contradict your results of sometimes over 100% scaling.
And you guys failed to mention that one of the yearś hottest game: Crysis does not run under Crossfire. I am sure the drivers will get fixed…but at this current time, it crashes:
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/diamond_viper_hd3850_crossfire/13.htm
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:19 am
This review miss fundamental benchs.Where are Call of Duty 4,Bioshock,Gears of War,World in conflict tests.Those are the latest benchmark for videocards and this review miss them all…
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:20 am
I forgot Crysis…
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:23 am
What you do ,you do it great.It’s what you don’t do that leaves me mumbling…
And I know they could be not so meaningful to you but they are for a lot of 19″owners:
i would also do 1280(noAA and AA) tests for games and not only 3dmark
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:34 am
OBLIVION anyone?
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:04 am
to Doug Friedman:
There is something must be clear.What you have look about the 8800gt or HD3870,all buy ourselve without any ATi/NV’s help.
please respect what we do and what we try.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:08 am
consider the 3-way SLI coming soon,about dec.11.The lastest multi-card topic will refresh then,please wait for our new test. What you guys suggestion is very important to me or expreview.com. Thanks again and again.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:34 am
@Doug Friedman
wah, when you find out and review said ATI have better performance you said it is paid review. when you find and review said NV have advantage you will only said awesome.
I already answer the crysis question in #77. please read through the whole thread before you posting anything..
also, there’s lots of problem in forceware/catalyst and crysis of supporting each other. the sli/cf issue is a problem. so we drop the game in the test.
and the 105% is what data shows. Anyone with a brain knew if you post the 105% out it will definitely become NVfanboys attack target. But we insist to post that becoz that’s what we got in the test.
And for your BIG USA question: Do you know almost every big brand mobo/VGA card/other pc hardware product you are using is made/assemble in china and begin selling in china even before their offical launch date?
That’s why we always can buy the latest products.
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Tri SLI will only support Ultra,GTX, and the GTS 640 hence the availability of dual connectors on those cards. The GT and GTS512 only have one. If G100 comes out without dual connectors nvidia will lose the performance crown for 2008 but only for extreme setups. THE math is simple. In speculated tri SLI there will be 3*g100=3*2 G92 chips rendering while for ati on 790fx it will be 8*R670 chips rendering. If though the G100 will only be dual sli compatible theN nvidia will fall behind even more with only 2*2G92 chips doing the job.
To be fair though noone (meaning very few) will put three 400+euros card in their pc. Most will end up with dual sli G100 or crossfire R680. So although ati will be performance king, they will be only at great cost. I guess 2008 will bring us something that we will have never seen before. ATI performance king amd NVIDIA sales king once more.It’s good to have the option anyway but they must collaborate with INTEL ASAP for penryn support with quad crossfire.It seems that the Phenom just doesn’t cut it for the enthusiast you and me. I believe ATI must harry the R700 big time.June will be too late.
ps thanks the guy that pointed out the 8xAA issue with the g92. If that is really the case then r680(2xr670) will be sufficient to beat g100 (2xg92) as everyone will be able to have 8xAA but nvidia will then be slower. Good news for us atifanboys!
December 6th, 2007 at 2:57 am
I am considering trading in an XTX1950 for two 3870 in crossfire. Is this a good move?
December 6th, 2007 at 5:34 am
CHECK! this out and tell me what you think about hd3870 in crossfire!
Extreme PC SI Radeon HD3870 Extreme XXX Edition 820Mhz Core | 512MB 2400Mhz DDR4 PCI-E DX10 /2 DVI/ HDTV/ AVIVO/ HDMI/ AC3 5.1 Sound – Retail
December 6th, 2007 at 5:48 am
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article [Comparison]HD 3870 Crossfire vs 8800GT SLI, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
December 9th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Hello everyone, I am getting a new computer and need to know which will perfrom better in crysis 2x hd3870′s in crossfire, or 2x 8800gt’s in SLI?
December 11th, 2007 at 10:00 am
personally i’m buying a 8800gt now or i’ll wait for a g92 8800gts and in the future another one of these cards and i’ll bet that the g92 8800gts sli will kill the 3870 crossfire.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
@ New computer
well i wont go for any mutil-GPU solution personally
coz they just give me some boost but bring much heat and noise to my platform.. i’d rather have single card solution
December 13th, 2007 at 7:45 am
nat even guy
December 14th, 2007 at 10:38 am
HAWT! Me want!
December 14th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Id agree that’s it better to go single card, but sometimes it isn’t the best choice. For 220, after the christmas rush, the HD 3870 has amazing value, when its CF’ed. It has good value when not CF’ed, but the 8800 beats it. Also you can go up to 4x with these cards. I like the sound of that, so when they aren’t so good anymore, just add two more. Anyway, I’m looking at the DX 10 benchmarks, and seeing the CF’ed cards take the lead. I’d be interested to see how the SLi compares when the new nvidia chipset is out. If your going to go with two cards right now, go HD 3870′s and don’t look back. If you can wait, I’d see what happens with the new nvidia chipset. Also, Nvidia’s supposed to realease their new GPU soon, and intel their nehalem, which seems to be incredibly fast. R700 is too far off. But waiting until second quarter 2008 might not be a bad idea. Just a thought.
December 14th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Bob your fucking retarded dude, seriously lmfao what are you part of the Nvidia focus Group?
I have a Q6600 and 2 3870s in crossfire similar to the review machine and while I may only get a couple thousand point boost in crossfire mode with my CPU at stock settings over one GPU once I start ocing my cpu the gap between one videocard and crossfire becomes increasingly greater, this is because quite simply most CPU’s and literally every single stock CPU will limit the ability of any dual GPU setup in 3Dmark and other 3d apps and if you look closely at their benches you can clearly see their Q6600 is overclocked.
So next time before you make such outrageous accusations why don’t you do a little research maybe? Maybe get a fucking brain you freaking moron.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:49 am
HD 3870 is amazing and much more silent and less power hungry than NVidia counterpart. I’ll go for 2 just in time for Xmas.
Go amd!
December 17th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
ye son
December 18th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Hey guys. I’ve got news for you. Yesterday me and a friend of mine bought a saphire 3870 each. I tested them with an Intel Q6600@ 3600 (9*400) on Asus commando (P965 with one pcix 16x and one 4x). First the single board scored in 3dmark06 about 12800 with clocks 862core/1200mem and the crossfire scored 17800. These are some good numbers people and if not anything they prove to me that expreview is for real. Not that i ever doubted them though.
In games i tested only call of duty 4 and supreme commander both in single and crossfire and everything else in crossfire only. My point was not to extract numbers, but gaming experience instead. Anyway i didn’t have much time.
So my feelings are rather mixed. To tell you the truth i don’t give a shit about 3dmark since i cannot play it. Games are more important. The only reason i use 3dmark is because we can have something standard to talk about.All testing was done at 1680*1050 with vsync and AA off.
Call of duty 4
In single card mode the game run very well with minimum slowdowns at some parts. In crossfire it run great getting really really fast at parts but for some strange reason when a slowdown occured it was even more severe. For example early in the game when there is a group of helicopters flying and reaching a city where the soldiers get off the chopper with a rope, then the frame rate was to laugh at. I said oh my god what the hell? We are talking below 20fps at that specific point. In all other areas (as far as i managed to see) was ok. I will test again with other OS (XP and Vista) because this was my old XP installation and maybe there are some problems. My gtx also runs funny at that game for no apparent reason but runs great under vista.
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance
Ok the second game i tested with one and two cards. Since my post is getting long i will cut this story short. With one card the game run very well and just a bit slower that my gtx. Absolutely playable at a loaded saved point with really heavy activity on the level. The strange thing is that with crossfire it run exactly the same. Absolutely no difference.WTF?
Unreal Tournament 3
It was the surprise of the day (only tested with crossfire)! Although i didnt expect it was smoother than a babys ass. I mean ok it runs very well on my gtx 60fps straight but there are points that there are a lot of hiccups.In crossfire mode i count three. Just three! You really saw it when it happened because it was THAT obvious since the whole game runs so unbeleivably smooth.
Well that’s it for now. Not really impressed aside from the “i don’t give a shit” 3dmark06.I will say again that i have viable suspicions for my os. I will continue heavy testing in the days to come. I have until January 8th to keep my friends 3870!
Also since my overclocked system scored more than expreview’s test i guess that the P965 chipset and the second pcix being only 4x does not seem to be the problem.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Oh and something else really important. Temperatures. The cards come with fan speeds at 25% and get to reach 70C. If you use rivatuner you can slide the fan control at a greater percentage and the temperatures fall greatly. That reminds me the same problem the 8800GTs have. Anyway at 72% fan throttle the fan just begins to become annoying but the temperature during 3dmark is 52C!
December 19th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Thank you for sharing your experiences.The UT3 engine did a great work.nice gfx with a low system requirment.
Also, all VGA cards in this era geting more annoying..
December 19th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I will be back soon with more info. I can give you the title of my next post though! DO NOT USE ATI 3870 CROSSFIRE WITH WINDOWS VISTA 64. Period.
December 20th, 2007 at 10:30 am
only tried vista 32bit..thanks for the heads up
December 21st, 2007 at 8:31 am
Hey pslord, can you try crysis on full and tell me the fps?
December 21st, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Crysis results benched with fraps in the beginning of the game from the turtle until shooting down the first three enemies.
q6600 @ 3600 and ati crossfire 3870 862core/1200mem res 1680*1050
min 11
max 37
avg 19,365
There are major graphic issues and i guess thats why expreview did not post any results of crysis (also the used vista32 which must have been even worse). It is obviously running better with a single card without any glitches (at least in the beginning of the game) but not fast enough
.
I did not bench without crossfire yet. I just saw it runs ok. I still have a lot of work to do. Oh i pity those reviewers. Now i understand what they are going through.
What i am trying to do is make an excel file with benchmarks of 28 games which i will upload to rapidshare and send you the link. I will use the above specs and i will bench in the begining of the games (or at specific load points) with fraps or with built in bench if it exists. Also these tests will be done with Crossfire,Without Crossfire and single GTX all at 1680*1050 or lower if this res is not available in the game. On top of that i intend to run all these tests on XP, VIsta32 and Vista64 (if fraps works with vista that is-i dont know yet). If you do the math 28 games * 3 system setups * 3 OSes =252 runs OMG
Maybe i will cancel the vista64 tests because the first tests were absolutely disappointing.
Also in a few days i will have an LG viewty mobile phone. I intend to record directly from my screen and upload to rapidshare the videos of the problematic tests of CF aka colin dirt,crysis,gears of war,lost planet, call of juarez and more…. The first four run at about 20fps with CF while call of juarez (dx9) runs like hell (meaning very fast) but with many glitches making it unplayable.
Crossfire has many many issues and i am really sorry for ATI. I really don’t know what these guys are doing honestly now. Nvidia releases drivers every 3 hours or so, correcting everything.
It is a real pity because the 3870 really does have great potential. I saw Oblivion running with vsync on outdoors in the forest and it run a smooth 60fps with CF on, the character at stoped position so the stupid HDD would not stream data. Moving the camera around really blow me away. Very very smooth.
Also gears of war with vsync on, WITHOUT CF runs at 60fps all the time as well as medal of honor airborne and the story continues.
Don’t get me wrong the 3870 is a great card and i will not say “for its money”. It’s just great. But up until now my tests show that it needs much more work. There are few exceptions. I don’t see myself buying a second 3870 unless these issues are fixed. And not only that. All this has me greatly worried since r680 will be essentially 2xr670s running in internal crossfire on the same pcb. If ATI intends to release this product without the company of ABSOLUTELY GREAT drivers, well they better not. Also nvidias G100 is coming in march and it will be faster than the dual G92 and single chip. But these are thoughts for my final posts.
December 21st, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Of it seems i forgot something.
Crysis settings
Windows xp, image quality everything high (without the xp patch for ultra super duper high aka vista image quality) driver version 7.11, no AA
And guess what. I just saw ATI released the 7.12 driver YESTERDAY so i will have to retest EVERYTHING FROM THE BEGINNING. Oh this is getting tiresome.
December 23rd, 2007 at 2:02 am
okEY….Crysis single 3870 as per the above
min 17 max 45 avg 26.563
I just figured out why the call it Crysis. It comes from [Cry Sys]tem because the system is crying once you start it.:P
December 25th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Ok Here is the file
http://rapidshare.com/files/78925353/TEST_RESULTS.rar.html
No vista tests sorry. But the number of tests was increased to 50
The test were done as per my previous notes.
Just to give you an idea of the scores
gtx won : 29
3870 cf won: 11
3870 single won: 7
Also ATI CF vs ATI single was as follows :
ATI 3870 CF won : 22
ATI 3870 single won : 24
Ati must fix the drivers. It is not acceptable the single 3870 to perform better than crossfire.
As i said before, even if the ati cards lost to the GTX the 3870 is great.Lets not forget that the GTX costs more than double the money. As you will see from the results the difference is not that great. At least not in the respect that gtx is playable while ati is not. We are talking super high frame rates for all setups.
Merry Christmas everyone.
ps i will try to get a friends 8800gt to bench it too.
December 28th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Oops! please note the quake 4 average fps, for the gtx, in my file is wrong. The score is 62.498 and not 42.498
December 28th, 2007 at 10:28 am
@ PSOLORD，
the bench is nice but the color of the chart is too..you know
I think maybe only using two similar colors can have a better appearance.
also it seems you only one loop in each bench?
December 29th, 2007 at 4:15 am
The 3870 is on sale for $193 at BestBuy.com. A great deal if you plan to CF.
December 31st, 2007 at 11:39 pm
pslord, the reason 3870 crossfire is losing so many is because of driver issues, for example, crossfire make a difference in crysis till the next catalyst driver thingy. So it is unfair to compare it.
January 1st, 2008 at 7:34 am
I’m not an expert in benchmarks. Ok it was my first try. True it was only one loop which may not be enough for professional sites but nevertheless i made my conclusions. Crossfire is immature at best. I cannot accept having two cards and worse performance. Sorry but i really don’t need to put my eyes in the jerking test more than once to figure out that something is terribly wrong.
All that would have no importance for me if ati was not scheduling multi chip solutions. But having seen this terrible results my wings are cut off. I am much less enthusiastic for the R680 now since it will be essentially the same thing. I am not enthusiastic for the dual G92 either, but i have not seen anywhere nvidia having such performance degradations in SLI setups.
As for the aesthetics of the excel file, well…it is an open excel and it was meant for reference only. I needed the colors to distinguish the cells thats all. Colors can be changed as one likes.
I will stick with my 3870 for now which is great but my sight is focused on G100 and R700 now.
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
January 1st, 2008 at 1:07 pm
——————del———————-
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:31 am
OVER9000 there is no need to be rude. We exchange thoughts here. No point in cursing. If you don’t like someone’s opinion skip it and move on.
——————————————————-
That was the polite part of my answer. If you want the rest of it you can leave me your email address.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:41 am
nigga pls
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:51 am
OVER9000, stfu, try and get out the house once in a while, grow up, find yourself a life, pick any of those and just leave…
——————
Thanks psolord for your benchmark work, while they might not be up to everyone standards they have definatly been really informative to me and im sure others too who have read this far down!
I guess its just a case of wait and see what develops.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:35 am
@ psolord,
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
the multi-GPU solution is a developing tech. Though ATI/NVIDIA is developing it for years but it still not glow up. so let’s hope in the next gen this tech will be more powerful.
thanks again for your bench.
@ over9000,
rude words is not welcomed here. i will clean your word for this time
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
ALLAH
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:49 am
To jeff and rappa thanks for your support. As i said a few posts back i am an ati fanboy. We all have our likes and dislikes.We all love something better than something else. But above all i am a gamer and enthusiast user. And i am not going to hide the truth from myself. Of course i prefer the better gaming rig along with power consumption.Thats why i chose the GTX for the past year. But now my test showed that the 3870 can stand well against competition and i had no more reason keeping the GTX. It’s value is quickly degrading so i would only lose money. Thats why i sold it and saving for the next gpu animal whether it will be ati or nvidia. It’s as simple as that. I made these tests to an overclocked system so everyone can draw their conclusions.
January 8th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Contain your excitement, Crossfire on the 3870 is majorly overrated, it gives a great 3dmark06 score, but is very intermittant on various games…really a situation of the software (drivers, games ect) needs to catch up with the hardware.
January 10th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
@ice
if you download my benchmark file from a few posts above you will that i have no reason to be excited by 3870 CF. Moreover the results guided me to be much less enthusiastic for the R680 too since it will be the same thing. The only thing that remains to be seen is the work ATI will do on the new drivers.
January 16th, 2008 at 5:59 am
No comments !
HD 3870 cross !!
February 5th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
[...] Des weiteren Skaliert SLI nicht so gut wie Crossfire. Zum Vergleich dieser Link oder dieser hierErste Vorabtest der GeForce 9800 GX2 im Forum vom vr-zone sehen, mangels unzureichender Treiber, [...]
February 8th, 2008 at 6:26 am
[...] a different opinion then him. But he can’t even hold a job so he has to fill his time somehow. Expreview.com – Extra Hardware News Report! [Comparison]HD 3870 Crossfire vs 8800GT SLI __________________ Get me a [...]
February 18th, 2008 at 1:41 am
What would you choose to do.
Wait for the R700 to come out this year sometime
Wait for the R800 to come out in 2009
Buy a 3870 X2 and say does my face look bothered to R700 and R800
Buy An Nvidia Card
Buy a S3 Chrome S400 Series card from somewhere
February 19th, 2008 at 6:33 am
This is a hard choice. How you choose?
February 19th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
hard choice…my heart want a X2 but my brain sais r700(Hd 4000 series)is near (late Q2 aka june)
finally, the brain is in control all the time(except love affair)-so I thnk will wait the summer arrive
PS: Nvidia not an option because I have a X38 board and want to maintain flexibility (1 card/2cards/quad crossfire)
February 28th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
hey marty.. i agree with you.. seems that both card can give what you’ve paid for..
April 18th, 2008 at 10:35 am
What I want to know is…
http://www.thaiboxinghk.com/pratices.htm
how much did AMD pay the people doing these benchmarks?
May 5th, 2008 at 5:28 am
If you would overclock the quad to about 3,6 GHz you would be getting much higer scores, i get about 18500 with my 8800gt sli, q6600 @ 3,555 GHz, geil black dragon 2×2 GB at 790 MHz.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
My Setup is
Vista 64 bit
E8400 @2x 3.9GHz
1066Mhz Ballitx 4GB 5-5-5-15
HD3870 CF
750W Real Power Coolmaster
ATI 8.5 Drivers
Gigabyte P35 DS3P Motherboard with lastest bios version
(notes all the P35 chipsets that have SLI from the first card at 16x and the second slot card at 4x. This is due to the amount of pipelines the chipset has which is a total of 32 lines of communication channels which is known as PCIE 1.1. One line goes to the onboard NIC. The rest go the Sata ports one for each which is a total of 8 for me. A couple more go to USB and 1x IDE which takes 2 lines. I don’t know where the last line goes to??) The X48 Chipset can run SLI or CF at 16 x each which is also known as PCIE 2.0)
Single HD3870 3D Mark 06 Score 12,000 @ default settings
CF HD3870 3D Mark 06 Score 16,000 @ default settings
Crysis with all patches installed runs worse with CF than single card and crashes with red screen resets with memory dump errors. Just to many bugs. 1680×1080
frame rates are about 17 to 45 but mostly 21 FPS.
The main reason i think everything’s is designed for Nvidia either because of funding or whatever the reason is ATI should be better on paper but its not supported due to the monopoly.
The main reason why i went for ATI was because of the image quality. I run my computer on most games at 1080P 1980 x 1280 resolution on my 40inch Samsung LCD tv. I can see the image qaulity difference and it is quite pleasing with the HD3870 compared to any Nvidia.
But whenever i play games like Crysis (powered by Nvidia is displayed on startup) i think oh no!! Most sites that rate Nvidia as the leader in speed, you should look more closely. They may get funding from Nvidia, same goes for ATI but more often and not its Nvidia, not to mention all the benchmarks fiddling around with the AA, turned on for ATI and off with Nvidia, read the small print.
Nvidia has been caught tweaking their drivers so they benchmark higher, removing image quality some times that but like this white type of foggy blur and basically cheating us out of image quality.
I’m not a fan of ATI or Nvidia. They both have their strong points but there reasons why i choose the HD3870 are?
* Better power consumption and lower heat with 65nm process fabrication
* Dual Slot cooling moves heat out of my case.
* Better image quality at higher resolutions
* The cards look better on paper (core, mem, pipelines etc)
* HD3870 is on model there is not a GT GS GTS GTX bull crap name conventions.
Reasons why i shouldn’t of got a HD3870 even more now since i just go t CF
* Drivers are buggy. I reinstalled both XP and Vista.
* Games powered by Nvidia Suck with support of ATI.
* Its so hard to find info about HD3870 help guides because everyone is with Nvidia.
Currently there is not enough support for ATI products but i would think once AMD settles down it should improve.
I do hope you make an informed decision. Do i regret buy the HD3870. No. I only regret Crossfire purchase with a P35 Chipset. It should pay off in about 3 to 4 months though with new drivers and maybe if i upgraded to a X48 chipset.
If anyone has any questions let me know and i will test them out with my HD3870 CF setup I can also test out other games if you want to know.
June 13th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Actually all dual GPU solution is buggy
you have to search a list for which game can be play under CF/SLI before you buy game
that’s why personally i will going for a single GPU solution
June 13th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
There is such a small list of games that can use crossfire. Even the new game Race Drive Grid will not run at all if crossfire is enabled. That’s a load of crap if its just a new release game. ATI/AMD need to enforce that games feature crossfire or none of the buyers can play games. Most of the time when i try to play any game now since my CF upgrade its crash after crash. The only joy i get is to disable CF while the other PCIE Card takes 20 to 50 Watts to just to sit there and look pretty and make a 25db noise. Just completely stupid!! No point.
Now I’m really wondering is the HD3870x2 going to be any different on the single PCB-dual GPU solution has an integrated CrossFire bridging chip to allow the two GPU cores to communicate and act as if they were two separate entities communicating over a conventional CrossFire configuration. It brings up a whole mountain of arguments as to whether the card is classified as a single GPU or a multi-GPU solution. Does anyone have an HD3870x2 and does it working on none crossfire enabled games with two GPU’s or not. Does this make the HD3870x2 just a useless as my CF HD3870’s
I did find this which is pretty out dated but 11/17/2007 but it seems that nothing has changed since then.
http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=262&threadid=89531&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear
****
2x 2900 XT
Call of Duty 4: Works really well, good fps gains.
UT3: This works, decent performance gains with CF enabled.
Bioshock: Works Amazing
Medal of Honor Airborne: Minimum 60 fps, one card drops to 35.
Half life 2: All the half life 2 engined games seem to work.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Gives an additional 100 fps at all times, sweet.
Gears of War: It works one cards drops to 50 fps in tested area in CF doesnt.
Hellgate London:Cant run DX10 fails with single card and CF. In DX9 mode 70 fps with single card, CF gets 100-120 same area.
Call of Juarez. Only have the DX9 version 60 fps single, 90 fps CF in tested area.
Gothic 3: Works really good.
Oblivion: Seems to work you might need to patch the game.
World of Warcraft: Crazy fps in this game.
Games that fail or have no improvement gains!
Crysis: Runs but a bit slower then single card i think. Some people can get it to work with crysis hotfix driver in winxp.
Need for Speed Pro Street: CF takes away half the performance.
The Witcher: Freezes up in load with CF.
Colin McRae’s DiRT : CF is useless in this game.!
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Why are new games not support CF. Seriously WTF is ATI doing? Or do they have no say in the matter as they are not working with the developers with games enough. Where is my Powered by ATI on startup on any of the new games!!
July 17th, 2008 at 11:11 am
[...] Reviews – ATI Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire Video Card Review – The Radeon HD 3870 Video Cards Arrive! [Comparison]HD 3870 Crossfire vs 8800GT SLI – Expreview.com HD 3870 in Crossfire vs. HD 3870 X2 :: TweakTown 3870 crossfire – Buscar con [...]
November 26th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
i have, a q6600Quadcore, vista ultiamte 64-bit, 4 gig ram, a crap mainboard an underpowered psu(450watt) and a BFG 8800GToc, the only reason I will NEVER fucken EVER go back to ATi is that its as unstable as shit and putting them in Xfire, suppose that’ll make it SHITSHIT, who Remembers the old VOODOO2, i had a 12mb one… well, thats where sli began, and guess what Nvidia bought 3Dfx so all the experts now work for … NVidia, don’t even get me started on AMD…
February 8th, 2009 at 7:58 am
killroy,go kill yourself emo ho..if it wasnt for AMD/ATI the tech you enjoy,would NOT BE around.they make the advancements and the nvida leeches conform it to their needs,so even if by the SLIM margin that nvida has a 2 fps curve WHO CARES? and as for ATI being unstable,you have yo pull both your thumbz outta your ass,befor you install,and and it might help to see if you took your tongue outta your friends ass before installing ATI hard/software,,,as for the nvida leeches…dont get me started
February 6th, 2011 at 2:14 am
very cool posting, RSS to folow!
July 3rd, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Hello! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be okay. I’m absolutely enjoying your blog and look forward to new posts.
February 9th, 2012 at 2:28 pm
I seldom comment, however i did some searching and wound up here [Comparison]HD 3870 Crossfire vs 8800GT SLI – Expreview.com. And I actually do have a few questions for you if you usually do not mind. Is it only me or does it look as if like some of the responses appear like they are left by brain dead individuals?
And, if you are writing at other social sites, I would like to keep up with everything fresh you have to post. Would you make a list of every one of all your social pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?