Shoney Boy

The Visiontek 3870x2 card certainly is a big boy.  The card itself measures 9.75 inches long which is a tad less than the norm for current generation high end cards.  The massive dual fan cooler that looks remarkably like the Thermaltake DuOrb (which we love around here) brings the size up to the point we even put the card on the scale.  I say remarkably like but not exactly as the Visiontek card is a much more robust cooler that is clearly geared to trump the venerable Tt DuOrb.  Weighing in at one and three quarter pounds, the Visiontek card is no lightweight.

As you know, the HD3870x2 card comes packed with two processors and double memory.  The first 512MB of GDDR3 memory are under the massive cooler on the face of the card with the second half gig being out back with no cooling at all.

Let's move back to this monster cooler.  Two 75mm fans spin within a heatpipe/radial fin structure to maximize the cooling efficiency.  The heatpipes are six millimeters in diameter and are responsible for transferring heat off a copper contact plate on each of the HD3870 GPUs.

The copper base plate is quite large as you can see below.  Not only does it make contact with the memory on the card's face, it also serves as a base for two additional banks of convection fins.

These two banks have their copper fins positioned so as to take full advantage of the twin 75mm fans blowing air down off the elevated heatpipe structure.  I'm expecting big things from such an impressive cooling array.

  

The HD3870x2 card is a dual GPU card as you already know.  If you want to take it up a notch, you can via the CrossfireX post and a second HD3870x2 card.  Dual dual GPUs.  That just sound cool in itself.

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Temperature, Sound, Test Bed
Pg 4 - Benchmarks
Pg 5 - Image Quality, Overclocking, Conclusion