Two HD 3870 X2 on Intell or only AMD chipset?

Hi all,

I was waiting till end this month to buy a new pc with 2 of the new ATI HD 3870 X2 (so 2x2GPU=4).

See : http://www.legitreviews.com/article/593/1/
and : http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] 0&Itemid=1

I'd like the intel quad 6600 cpu (since it has the best benchmarks compared to the AMD quadcores) but I was wondering if a board like the Asus Maximus Formula Special Edition with 2 PCIe 2.0 (both 16x) would work since it has the Intell X38 chip with crossfire support but not crossfireX as the AMD 970FX chipset.

As I understand it : CrossfireX = 4 GPU or 4 cards and crossfire is with 2 GPU or 2 cards. But what happens now with 2 GPU's on one card as in the new ATI HD 3870 X2 ?

So will I be able to use 2 ATI HD 3870 X2 cards in the Asus Maximus Formula Special Edition or will I need to get a AMD MB with crossfireX?

So you are saying I'll need to get a MB with a AMD chipset to run crossfire HD3870 2X cards with a slower AMD cpu...
But I could run the slower crossfire HD3850 2X on the intel 38X chipset with a faster intel quad cpu.

Sounds like AMD / ATI does not want the high end market.
They will drive them to the quad SLI nVidia 9800 (also with 2 cards) since they can be combined with the faster intel cpu's.

Maybe I should wait a few extra weeks and get that in stead?
I'm afraid those will be much more expensive...

my current rack is getting very slow and I had allready postponed getting a new system several times, maybe I should get the current quad HD3870 AMD Crossfire X system from AMD.

http://www.amd-unleash2.com/index.php?lang=en

Anybody have this, any comments compared to the new cards?
I understand the new cards have the same GPU's, they are just combined on the same card. Would this be faster?

Interesting. Would you mind sharing those benchmarks?

Yeah, a lot of confusing info posted here.
Go here for the facts: http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/faq.html
2- 3870's or 2 3850's WILL work in crossfire on any board with a 965, 975, 35, or 38 series chipset, and of course 2 PCIe slots.

lol fanboism?

I have just noticed something with the second pic. None the sites have been allowed to show the back of the card. If you look closely at the second pic you can see the back of the card and the heatsink brackets around what must be both the gpu's.

Have you seen the rez that it gets those results at. If that is a real result and considering thats vista thats very good.

yay, thats more like it!
Lets just hope that card is cheaper than 2 normal 3870s.

The thing I was actually wondering is if the intel board would run 2 of the dual GPU cards (so actually quad GPU's).

The new R680 is essentially two RV670 GPU cores on the same board = HD 3870 2X

see http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] &Itemid=57

Here we read :

R680 is already known as Radeon 3870 X2, and it should be available later this month or early next month. ... and even in Skulltrail Intel was happy to tell the world that it supports two RV670 cards; and that with the right driver it can even do four cards.

What do they mean with "in Skulltrail" ?

I guess that the X48 chipset will some day (?) be able to run two Radeon 3870 X2 in crossfire.

I'll wait and see the next two weeks for more reviews.

Or get a Phenom end of this month with a crossfireX MB and hope those can handle 4 GPU's on two cards since they are build to handle 4 GPU's on 4 cards.

I'm gonna get a 24" monitor and I'd like to run all games and apps on full 1920 res.

Anyway I much appreciate all the input!

@tjoepie - jitpublisher answered your question above.

Skulltrail is Intel's upcoming enthusiast platform which is based off of a xenon server mobo. It will be very expensive, beyond the 2 CPUs it uses FB-DIMM RAM. Personally, I wouldn't even consider this as an option.

I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the new Radeon 3XXXs do not require the crossfire bridge connector to run in crossfire w/ certain PCIe 2.0 chipsets.

^FYI, of course I was referring to all of the blue lights on that snazzy case they first previewed it in!

P.S. - How did you pass up the chance to go after the typo in this thread's title? I am wondering if your grammar is really as impeccable as it seems: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4246472.stm
I surprisingly scored 16/20, 2 of my wrong answers were obviously spelling Qs!

Two of these should work in an X38, think of it as Crossfiring the two 16x lanes as opposed to the cards - it's two physical connections being Crossfired as the cards operate as a single unit even though they have two cores.

I was thinking, yes it happens sometimes and it hurts ;-) , It must be possible:

Or else you would need crosfire to run even a single card with 2 gpu's on any MB and I don't think ATI would limits sales due to this.

has anyone seen specks to the length of this card it looks like a problem getting it in a case

here are 2 more so you can see they are bigger then the mobo



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this really does not look any bigge then an 8800GTX which is 11 inches so they look 11-12inches

http://en.expreview.com/?p=219#more-219

Here's the first review :-)