Introduction

The one downside about graphics cards which carry two cores on the singular PCB is that they're normally slower than buying two separate cards based on the same tech. What we're going to look at here today is the performance of the HD 3870 X2 compared to the HD 3870 in Crossfire.

Okay, let's clear that up a little bit more. What we have with us is the HD 3870 X2 from MSI coming in at 860MHz core and 1800MHz DDR on the 1GB of GDDR3 memory. At the other end of the spectrum we have two HD 3870 cards running in Crossfire which carry a core clock of 775MHz with the 512MB of GDDR4 coming in at a hefty 2250MHz DDR.

We're not going to look at the packages etc. since we've covered that side of things with the cards separately in the past. We're simply just going to get stuck straight into the benchmarking, so let's leave it at that and move on.