Introduction

We've been given an indication of the pricing which is going to accompany the new 8800GTS; when it came to figuring out what exactly it would compete against in the red corner, we soon after came to the following conclusion.

The HD 3850! Oh, but not just one of them, rather two working together in Crossfire. So it was clear what we had to do; grab a pair of HD 3850 cards, stick them into our beloved P35 motherboard and let them go at it. Two setups enter with one setup to come out on top.

What we have with us today is a pair of GECUBE HD 3850 cards under the new X-TURBO III naming scheme. With an increased core and memory clock, and without much of a difference in price these could be the 3850s to pick up.

It's been a while since we've seen anything from GECUBE, and though we're not going to cover these cards in detail today (except for their performance), we will take a deeper look in a future article.

What we will be doing now is to briefly look at the clock speeds of the cards (below our test system details), and then we'll just simply get straight into it with the benchmarks to see if HD 3850s in Crossfire have what it takes to beat out the singular G92 based 8800GTS.