X-bit labs

PowerColor Accelerates ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2.

Category: Video

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/04/2008 | 02:53 PM ]

It is evident that AMD will not be introducing any new graphics solutions in the nearest future that will be able to compete with the dual-chip graphics accelerators from Nvidia scheduled to appear very soon. The upcoming Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 will undoubtedly be faster than ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. However, despite this fact, AMD partners suggest their own ways of speeding up the performance of the top dual-GPU solution.

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 modification with GDDR4 memory that has been discussed for a long time already has finally become a reality. Today PowerColor announced the upcoming production of an alternative Radeon HD 3870 X2 based solution with higher performance. This graphics card will use GDDR4 graphics memory from Samsung with the total capacity of 2 x 512MB. The card will work at 825/2252MHz frequencies, which is higher than the 825/1800MHz frequencies of the regular Radeon HD 3870 X2 with GDDR3.

The card will also be equipped with an original cooling system. Each of the graphics chips has its own heat-spreader with heat-pipes leading to the shared heatsink. The PLX chip is also covered with an individual heatsink.

Unfortunately, this graphics card doesn’t support PCI Express 2.0 working only with PCI Express 1.1, which is determined by the PLX bridge features. So, the rumors about the upcoming launch of an updated chip version haven’t really been confirmed yet.

There are three DVI ports and one HDMI port on the card’s rear panel. There is also enough room for a TV-Out. The pricing and availability schedule for this product haven’t been revealed yet.