Power requirements are demanding with any high end card and the HD3870x2 is no different.  Two PCI-E power connectors are on the card's rear to keep the dual GPUs fed.  Visiontek recommends the use of a 550 watt power supply with this card and a 750 watt PSU if you plan on running a pair via a Crossfire motherboard.

For my part, I prefer a pair of 22" LCD monitors.  Looking at the output end of the card we find a whopping four DVI outputs.  This just had me looking at my desk and the wall behind it thinking of a Star Trek like 42" main screen with three 22" LCD's under it...  O' to be Donald Trump.  You also have a S-Video out in addition to the quad DVI outs.  Five outputs; very impressive.

Installation and Operation

Installing the card, we also found that it measured 9.75" making it much shorter than the full reference 10.5 inches of length found elsewhere.  This will ease access to any IDE, SATA, USB and/or chipset coolers on your mainboard.  Even at this slightly shorter length, with the HD3870x2 installed, the card effectively acted as a physical firewall forcing us to rethink cable and connection routing.  In this case however, it is nowhere near as difficult as we found with the reference design HD3870x2 card.

Our test bed has undergone some changes with this review.  Our older ASUS P5N32E SLI Deluxe mainboard took issue with the Visiontek HD3870x2 and wouldn't POST regardless of what we did.  Visiontek sent over a second review unit for us to test which gave us the same results.  Jeremy also runs an ASUS P5N32E SLI board so we shipped the card to him for a try - no go there either.  This really seemed odd as this was the same board we used to test the HIS HD3870x2 card which worked fine.  Building a new system around a new ASUS Maximus Formula motherboard put everything to rights with the Visiontek HD3870x2 running flawlessly.  Be aware however that there is a compatibility issue here at least with the ASUS P5N32E SLI board.  Visiontek's engineers are trying to figure this out to see what can be done however.

Temperature

The first HD3870x2 card we reviewed here packed a reference design cooler and ran way too hot.  Too hot being defined as 63 degrees Celsius at idle and 79 degrees Celsius under load hot.  Here is where the proof is in the pudding.  Visiontek's copper uber robust DuOrb like cooler took our load temperatures down to 63 degrees Celsius.  Under load, this card ran at what the reference design did at idle.  Installing the card in our Zalman GT-1000 LAN box we did see a 4 degree C rise in ambient over a GeForce 8800GT but this isn't seen as bad at all.  With the extra circulation Visiontek has with this cooler, it keeps hot stagnant air from accumulating.  Idle temperatures also showed to have benefited significantly to Visiontek's cooler running at 43' C where we had seen 63' C with the reference design.

Noise level

Another big plus about the Visiontek cooler is that it ran quietly at idle.  Its variable rate fans spinning up under load did so audibly but not obnoxiously so. 

Performance

Our test bed the same basic system as we have used for the past number of months with the exception of a new ASUS Maximus Formula X38 based mainboard.  The OS is Windows Vista Home Premium installed in a RAID Stripe array (RAID 0) on two Western Digital SATA II HDDs.  Our comparison card for grins will be the Inno3D 8800 GT iChill Edition.

Testing will be done with real world game play using frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program.  Results are graphed in three minute segments from three game titles, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and STALKER.  Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record game play from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products.  Screen resolution and other settings will be listed out before each performance graph.  Full screen anti aliasing will be set to 0x in our testing.  ATi's latest Catalyst 8.5 was used in all tests.

Test Bed

• ASUS Maximus Formula mainboard

• Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4GHz) @ 3.0GHz

• ThermalRight Chill Factor Thermal Paste

• Kingwin RVT 12025 D Cooler

• (2) 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-6400 Memory (4-4-4-15) @ DDR2-867

• (2) 250MB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA II HDD in RAID 0 Array

• Generic 16x DVD-RW drive

• Tt ToughPower 1200w PSU

• Windows Vista 32 Home Premium with all service packs installed

• Open rack layout

 

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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