GeCube Radeon HD3870X2 Video Card

GeCube Radeon HD3870X2
GeCube is a brand owned by a company from Taiwan, called Info-TEK. It is specialized in making graphics cards based on AMD/ATI chips. The HD3870X2 card is based on the RV670 chip, actually on two of them, both on the same PCB(that's where the X2 comes from).

Box Contents

In the box, along with the card you can find a thick manual, CD with the drivers, two DVI to VGA adapters, one DVI to HDMI adapter, S-Video to RGB cable and one CrossFire bridge.

Specifications

Compared to the HD3870X2 card even the massive 8800GTS 640MB looks small. The HD3870X2 is 10.5inches(26.67cm) long, which is longer than the width of an ATX board. The card has 640 stream processors, 32 texture units and 32 rendering units. That's a total of 1.332 billion transistors which give it the computing power of over one teraflop. You have to admit that these are some impressive numbers. The GPU supports the latest DX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, 32-bit FPU filtering and OpenGL 2.0. The GPUs work at 825MHz each (the normal HD3870 works at 775MHz). It comes with 1GB of DDR3 memory working at 900MHz(1800MHz effectively). The ATI PowerPlay technology controls the GPUs and changes the voltage and the frequency depending on the load. That's why this card has very low power consumption when in Windows. Other features include: the Unified Video Decoder (H.264/AVC i VC-1) that allows reproduction of HD DVD and Blu-Ray content in 1080p, the Ultimate Image Quality that goes beyond the 1080p standard and allows resolutions up to 2560x1600. It also supports HDMI and has the new AMD's Xilleon HDTV coder.

Overclocking and temperature

Overclocking of this card is only possible if you have the 8-pin PCIe power connector. Combining the 8-pin and the 6-pin connector unlocks the ATI Overdrive option in Catalyst Control Center and you can raise the GPU and memory frequencies. But unfortunately the ATI Overdrive has a limit at 878MHz for the GPU and 955MHz (1910MHz DDR) for the memory. At those frequencies the card completed all the benchmarks without any problems and I'm sure it could be overclocked more if the ATI Overdrive didn't have the limit. They will probably raise the limit in the next version of the drivers though.

Temperatures:

Idle:

GeCube 3870X2 - 65°C(149°F)
GeCube 3870X2 @ OC - 66°C(150.8°F)

Load:

GeCube 3870X2 - 83°C(181.4°F)
GeCube 3870X2 @ OC - 86°C(186.8°F)

Benchmarks

3DMark 06

HD3870X2 - 15180 marks

COD4 Modern Warfare DX10 (1280x1024, 4xAA, 16xAF)

HD3870X2 - 77.06 fps
HD3870X2 @ OC - 77.18 fps

Company Of Heroes - Opposing Fronts DX10 (1280x1024, 4xAA, 16xAF)

HD3870X2 - 48 fps
HD3870X2 @ OC - 49.3 fps

Crysis DX10 (1280x1024, 4xAA, 16xAF)

HD3870X2 - 21.50 fps
HD3870X2 @ OC - 26.13 fps

Half Life 2 Episode Two (1680x1050, 4xAA, 16xAF)

HD3870X2 - 121.4 fps
HD3870X2 @ OC- 123.8 fps

Conclusion

The GeCube Radeon HD3870X2 is a card with lots of potential. I believe that the performance will go up with every driver update, and the overclocking limits should also be removed. Considering that Crossfire and SLI still have lots of bugs, this should be a better choice. But if you want the ultimate gaming machine, this card also has the ability to be paired with another one, which would make a total of 4 GPUs on one PC, a real power sucking monster. All in all, I think that this card is not a bad choice for people who can afford it.

Links

HD3870X2 at Rage3D.com - tons of good pictures and benchmarks

HD3870X2 vs. 9800GX2 at Tom's Hardware