Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire benchmarked

What appears to be a brand new review site has got its hands on a pair of ATI Radeon HD 3870 cards and they've put the cards through their paces to see how well they perform in CrossFire. The cards are apparently clocked at 777MHz for the core and 2,252MHz for the memory. These aren't exactly the expected stock speeds, but at least it's not far off.

They've kindly dissected one of card for everyone's viewing pleasure as to show you what the card looks like without all that plastic and metal on top. The test system specs are very vague at best, the site used the 7.10 Catalyst drivers as well as the brand new Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU, but apart from that very few details are available. It looks as if the cards are on a board that was only capable of dual x8 PCI Express, at least that's what showing on one of the driver screenshot pages, but it's a PCI Express 2.0 board.

The benchmarks for the CrossFire setup are limited to 3DMark06, but there are also some Crysis numbers from a single card. We're looking at scores of 12,590 3DMarks for a single card, while two cards in CrossFire manages 20,383, compared to 13,837 for a single 8800 GT at 1,280x1,024. At no time does the single card outperform the 8800 GT in 3DMark06, although it seems like this is a very limited review, as no other resolution was used.

In Crysis we're looking at 1,280x1,024 again and the default benchmark, which produced 14.77 fps for the 3870 while the 8800 GT managed 16.77. According to the site, the ATI card seemed to have much higher image quality.

You can find the full (p)review here