Also from a price/performance ratio it would be nice to see how it performs against a 8800GT SLI 256MB in current games. 8800 GT 256MB SLI can be had for $430 and I would guess it would perform better at low-med resolutions than this x2.

I wouldn't spend four hundred bucks for gaming at 1280x*, one single 512MB GT or GTS is more than enough for that.

And as you scale up to 1680*1050, I personally believe that buying 2x256MB is silly. Therefore, I believe that the 512MB one is the only reasonable 8800GT.

Your plan sounds like low-res overdriving and doesn't seem wise to me.

Giacomo

It's not my plan, I just said it would be good for a price/performance comparison for something like a future review.

Although I no longer game at 1280, doesn't mean others don't and 2-8800gt's with more performance and less price may be beneficial for them. Personally I think SLI is a waste anyway, but if you are considering an X2, 8800 SLI is an affordable comparison whether at 256 or 512.

That's always curious to see users talking about "lacking of engineering efforts" and so on, as if they can teach Intel/AMD/nVIDIA how they should implement their technologies. PCI-X 2.0 is now out, and then we start seeing people who look at the previous version as it definitely should be dismissed. Folks, maybe we should at least consider that the 3870 design simply doesn't generate so much bandwidth to justify a PCI-X 2.0 bridge, don't we?

Sorry, but I kinda laugh when I read "engineering" suggestions from users, supposedly like me, independently from how good their knowledge is. We're not talking about a Do-It-Yourself piece of silicon, we are talking about the last AMD/ATi card. And the same, of course, would apply to an nVIDIA one, to Intel stuff, and so on. The most correct approach I think it would be something like this: "Oh, see, they put a PCI-X 1 bridge in there, and look at the performance, when it's not cut by bad driver support, the scaling is amazing... So it's true that PCI-X 2.0 is still overkill, for nowadays cards".

That one sounds rationale to me.

About Crossfire, CrossfireX is needed for two 3870X2 to work together, and I've read in more than one place on the web that drivers for that aren't ready yet. Apart from this, before spitting on scaling and so on, don't forget that all these reviews are done with very early beta drivers...

Giacomo

That's not exactly right. I mean, the average is not pulled up by any incredible maximum, it works in a different way: the maximum are nothing incredibly higher than the normal average, simply those minimum are rare, due to particular circumstances in which the application (the game) loads up stuff in the card while it's rendering, and it shouldn't do. This is the juice of an ATi's answer posted in the review by DriverHeaven. They told ATi about these instantaneous drops and that was the answer.

Of course, remaining the fact that other cards didn't show similar problems, I believe that the problem is more driver-related, and ATi should really work fast to fix issues like this one.

However, DriverHeaven reported that this issue showed up mostly in scenario-loadings indeed, and therefore wasn't too annoying.

For what I've understood.

My two cents,
Giacomo

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