After reading through forums and reviews, I've decided on purchasing the fastest graphics card configuration currently available to an Intel platform; a pair of AMD/ATi HD3870XT in CrossFire.
The HD3870XT is the latest AMD graphics offering, although slower than the nVidia competitor, it offers great performance for it's cost, and to the consensus of many users, offer better image quality and colour compared to nVidia's solutions.
Also, AMD/ATi's Multi-GPU setup, CrossFire, scales better then nVidia's SLi setup, offering higher percentage of performance increase when additional GFX cards are added.
HD3870XT also has a much more efficient video decoding, utilising less CPU then nVidia while playback.
Because of the nature of CrossFire, new games will most likely benefit from it, and subsequent driver updates will optimise it even further. SLi on the other hand require specific tweaks in the driver to optimise performance, so support for games come only when a new version of ForceWare is published, on average once every 1~2 months, and there is no guarantee that your game is on their list to support SLi.
Anyway, without further ado, here are today's guests:
In my DD Torture Rack for testing/benching:
Small fan is added for airflow on the primary card:
Overview:
And here is my 3DMark06 score, as I'm running on Windows Vista, if you are running windows XP you can comfortably add another 500 points to the score. Note that the QX9650 is clocked at a lowly 4.05Ghz:
This pair is currently air-cooled, and as you can see is not really wise to do so on a duel-slot cooler design. I have been able to overclock the core from 777Mhz to 850Mhz, at which point the primary card becomes toasty hot at 78~ degrees. I have some water blocks on order, and will report back if there are more headroom form these cards, and hopefully will pass the 21000 mark easily.
Overall I'm very pleased with their performance and picture quality, and they are currently the fastest graphics setup by quite a margin on the Intel platform even without cooling modification/overclocking. At £330 a pair it even cost cheaper than the fastest nVidia offering for Intel chipsets, an overclocked nVidia 8800 GTS 512 with a waterblock!!! How awesome is that?
With all the 8800 GTS 512 praise and following, an AMD/ATi offering is a fresh breath of air. And by the looks of it, I'm surprised it did not get the attention it deserves.
nVidia chipset performance. Intel chipset stability. Need I say more?
(p.s. AMD did not pay me to post this topic... although it may sound like it and I am not at all a fanboy as I also own 2 nVidia 8800 Ultras )
try xp32. i would expect about 25000 3dmark06 with this setup. and then try to run this with crysis or any other new game and see the fps as well for any problems? also overclocking in crossfire doesnt always give linear increase results unfortunatelly.
i too believe the rv600/670 are great chips, but unfortunatelly let down by poor drivers support as well as not many game develpers get to work with amd/ati and the result is not the way is meant to be played
Haha Vincent I was asking myself if I should buy a retail version of Windows XP, but I kept thinking that it is a step in the wrong direction, having brought retail Vista Ultimate and all....
Thanks for the pictures E_F, it's like free candy! Very nice looking cards, can't wait to see your watercooling setup. Hey do you reckon you could take a picture of the cards without the heatsink/fan, I wanna see the PCB bare .
Taking off the heatsink/fan was the first thing I did, to remove the stock thermal paste and apply some AS5, but forgot to take some pictures in the process... too anxious to get it up and running 3DMark... However I found another 3870 naked:
I have some raw data for the Crysis benchmark, which compare how different CPU speed, Memory speed/amount + Raptor Vs. SSD, Single card/CrossFire, DirectX 9/10, no AA/4xAA affects your frame rate, and would like someone that can make nice looking and well constructed graphs showing these data, that we can use to easily compare them.
As I'm no good with graph construction, I thought you guys may want a little challenge!
Anyone interested? I will send the raw data to you in Microsoft Excel format, and of course you will be credited for your work!!
I have some raw data for the Crysis benchmark, which compare how different CPU speed, Memory speed/amount + Raptor Vs. SSD, Single card/CrossFire, DirectX 9/10, no AA/4xAA affects your frame rate, and would like someone that can make nice looking and well constructed graphs showing these data, that we can use to easily compare them.
As I'm no good with graph construction, I thought you guys may want a little challenge!
Anyone interested? I will send the raw data to you in Microsoft Excel format, and of course you will be credited for your work!!
I'd love to help as, despite not having the game, I always like to see how different systems run Crysis. Unfortunately, my graph making skill is around the same level as my skill with art. Absolutely non-existant.
I'd love to help as, despite not having the game, I always like to see how different systems run Crysis. Unfortunately, my graph making skill is around the same level as my skill with art. Absolutely non-existant.
Perhaps we should collaborate and make our millions by releasing..`Art of the Stickman!`
and I am not at all a fanboy as I also own 2 nVidia 8800 Ultras 
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I don't feel jelous at all, I like him posting this stuff it's awesome 
