Page 3 - Specs continued & HIS bundle

With the Radeon HD 3870 X2 AMD took two Radeon (RV670) HD 3870 GPU's placed them on one board, bridged them (see that as an internal x16 PCIe bus connection for data communication) and then changed another thing or two.

See, not only is the effect of two GPU's rather extraordinary, so is the clock speed; which is now running at an amazing 825 MHz (775 Mhz on reference 3870). The memory however is clocked at 1.8GHz, which is lightly slower compared to the fastest 2.25 GHz reference 3870, yet still plenty of bandwidth and more cost effective.

HIS technology bundled the card with the following:

Thou shall find:

• DVI to VGA Dongle x 1
• DVI to HDMI Dongle x 1
• S-Video to Composite adapter
• Crossfire bridge x 1
• Manual
• Driver CD
• Half-life 2 discount coupon
• Handy multi-purpose magnetic screwdriver has several different tips under its cap, a built in level and LED light. It sounds pretty simple, but really .. that's a cool gadget.

For those of you that noticed, yes a Crossfire bridge connector is included as well, it will be possible to combine two HD 3870 X2 cards in CrossfireX. Meaning you will have 4x RV670 processors crunching games for you. That's quad core GPU gaming. Pretty interesting though.

Anyway, the bundle is pretty okay. No additional software in the form of full games though. You do get a small gadget. Photo above; the new included multi-purpose screwdriver is funny and handy. But let's dive into the product technology again. Next to shrinking that die-size ATI did make another clever move; the move back to the 256-bit memory bus (still using the 512-bit ring-bus). It's much cheaper to work with memory and less expensive to integrate. So combining these factors can make the overall products less expensive. RV670 and thus R680 as well also makes the move towards PCI-Express 2.0 compatibility which doubles the bus (PCIe) data rate towards 16GB/s. Not that we need it at this time though ... although with CrossfireX it might make a difference.

	ATI Radeon HD 2900 ATI Radeon HD 3850 ATI Radeon 3870 X2 ATI Radeon HD 3870 # of transitors 700 million 666 million 1332 million 666 million Stream Processing Units 320 320 640 320 Clock speed 742 MHz 670 MHz 825 MHz 775 MHz Memory Clock 1.6 GHz (effective) 1.66 GHz (effective) 1.8 GHz (effective) 2.25 GHz (effective) Texture Units 16 16 32 16 Render back-ends 16 16 21 16 Memory 512MB GDDR3 512MB GDDR3 2x 512MB GDDR3 512MB GDDR3/4 Memory interface 512-bit 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit Fabrication process 80nm 55nm 55nm 55nm Power Consumption (peak) ~215W ~90W ~200W ~105W