A final bench we included was Futuremark's latest benchmarking suite, 3D Mark Vantage for Vista based machines.  While I'm not a huge fan of canned benches, a number of you have e-mailed asking that we include some of the Futuremark benchmarks.  So here you go.

Image Quality

Below is a non-compressed screen shot from NFS: Pro Street and Unreal Tournament 3.  Resolution was set to 1600 with eye candy set to max to include max FSAA for NFS and 1920 for UT3 with all settings tapped out.  Visual quality becomes a subjective thing at this level.  Rather than my tell you, see for yourself below.  It's said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Overclocking

The reference design calls for 825MHz on the core and 1800 on the memory clock.  The Visiontek card is already overclocked to 840/1920MHz but let's see how much more is left.  Using the latest Catalyst 8.5's Overdrive panel we hemmed and hawed until we tapped the Visiontek HD3870x2 out at 860MHz on the core and 1980MHz on the memory.  Firing Crysis back up let's see what this does for our frame rates.

Conclusion

Visiontek has done a wonderful job with their Radeon HD3870x2 card.  They have taken the base of what ATi put out and improved it significantly.  Let me get this out of the way right off though; the Visiontek HD3870x2 is a very nice graphics solution but at its $450 price point, it just doesn't offer the most for your upgrade dollar as say the HD3850x2 or a generation old 8800GT.  That said, I don't see this as an issue with Visiontek.  They have taken the HD3870x2 design from ATi and rehabbed it into an acceptable product.  Remember that the reference design's drivers, cooling design and heat issues were exceptionally problematic.  Visiontek has shown that their engineers clearly are able to think outside the box and come up with some real innovation.

We would have liked to see more raw performance out of the HD3870x2.  Counting cost in pennies per pixel makes this not as an attractive option as many were expecting.  The motherboard compatibility issue we saw on more than one board in more than one system with the ASUS P5N32E SLI was perplexing to say the least.  Visiontek is clearly looking to figure out what is going on here to be addressed later.

At the end of the day, the Visiontek HD3870x2 Overclocked Edition Card gets the job done nicely.  Image quality and game play was excellent and will give the end user a quality experience with enough lifetime that their next VGA upgrade could be far down the road.  For the multiple monitor folks, quad DVI outputs will certainly draw a crowd and make this HD3870x2 card clearly ahead of their crowd of competitors.  This on top of the killer cooling solution and factory overclock Visiontek instilled already.  Our thanks go out to Visiontek for sponsoring this review.

Pros

• Excellent performance

• Factory overclock

• Killer performing GPU cooler

• Shorter than other high end VGA cards

• Quad DVI

• Excellent image quality

Cons

• Pixels per penny ratio poor

• Possible motherboard compatibility issue

BACK                    HOME

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