ati new x2 card article is gone!

I saw the article too late at night, around midnight+.
No clue where it went though.

did you get to read the whole thing? i remember reading sonething about how the graphics card companies are trying to put a hold on reviews till close to the actual launch date. might have just put it up for testing?

I read the full article at around 11PM Tuesday night....

What i can remember is, that the 3870 X2 beat the 8800 Ultra in a FEW cases, expecially at higher resolutions (like 1900xwhatever that resolution is....).

The 3870 X2 lost to the Ultra in the Need for Speed Game.

Overall tests though including AOE 3 (which the 3870 X2 beat the Ultra in) and Crysis, the 3870 X2 had a higher avg FPS than the Ultra at high resolutions.

Sorry, can't remember much on details. I only know that my conclusion at the end of the article was that it only beats the Ultra in a few cases and not by much.

Oh ya, overall card length was like 26.7cm...

Yeah, I managed to read the entire thing last night. The NDA was actually moved back to the 28th along with the release date (28th) for the cards. Presumably, it is due to ATi's desire to have reviewers give a first look only AFTER their new drivers are ready.

The 3870x2 beat out the 8800Ultra in most cases (The racing game [w/e its called] was the major exception - 10 fps difference] and the overall average game fps section showed the 3870x2 as having around a 15% increase in performance over the 8800Ultra.

There was a thread created in response to the situation earlier today, probably needs some bumping back to the top. It included some benchies and info people managed to remember as well.

Ummm why would Intel care about video cards? Are the 3870x2 really threats to the GMA 3000?!?

I read the entire article, and will rehash as much of it as i can. The testing was done at high resolutions (1650x1050 and 1920x1200) for a change and included a 3870, 3870x2, a 8800gt, an 8800gts, and an 8800 ultra if I remember correctly.

The games used were Test Drive, AOE3, Crysis, UT3, Supreme Commander, COD4, Stalker, and a few others i can't recall at the moment.

In most of the games tested, the 3870x2 was the victor, especially at the higher resolution. Sometimes the 3870x2 was as much as 40% faster, but was usually between 10 and 15% faster than the ultra in the games it won. The 3870x2 was smoked in Test Drive and Supreme Commander though. The article said this was due to the fact that ATI hadn't created profiles for these games to take full advantage of crossfire, and the ultra won these easily.

Overall the 3870x2 beat the ultra by a margin of about 12% if i remember correctly. The results were a little closer with filters turned on, but I was shocked to see the ATI card hold its own very well, winning more often than not even with filters on.

Results were also good on the 2560x1600 tests for the 3870x2, with it again winning more games than not.

Power numbers were not in the 3870x2's favor, with it easily being the most power consuming card in the roundup. On AOE 3 at peak consumption it used over 250 watts if I remember correctly; AOE was used as the benchmark for this test, but the review also mentioned consumption reaching 287 watts peak on Stalker if I recall correctly.

The card could not be overclocked from its standard 825(?) core speed and the memory could be overclocked to 955 from 900(?) stock. I'm pretty sure those numbers are correct. It mentioned the Italian and French teams( think those were the ones, I know Italian and another European country) were able to clock the core to 858 for some reason. Either way the card utilized ddr3 and could not get near the 1200 of the 8800's ddr4 memory, but this didn't seem to hamper the card much considering its 512 bit memory bus

This looks very promising for ATI indeed. While not an overwhelming beat down or anything, it seemed to be a pretty clear victory, and as time goes along it could be expected that with driver revisions and updates, ATI can and will include profiles to support games like supreme commander, in which it was beaten handily. I know I can't wait to see a couple of these monsters in crossfire....using up a full 500 watts...

I hope this was all accurate. I did the best i could to remember everything.

PS crysis scored 30 fps at 1920x1200 with settings high on 3870x2....

Post from the previous thread on the issue:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] 870-review

thanks guys. i guess i wasnt the only one to notice. i was kind of surprised at how low some of the bench marks were. but i still think that the performance will get better as time goes on via the drivers. look at what happened to the 2600xt... it sucked balls at release date. but now the price is down and the performance is respectable at that price.. i think this card is going to put ati back on the high end map so to speak.

I remember the MSRP being around $500 if i remember though that could be wrong.