Which offers better performance?
9600gt SLI or 3870 CF?
Someone tell me!

Well, it really depends on the game really.....
 
Try this article :
http://www.techspot.com/article/88 [...] on-hd3870/

Using COD4 for reference...........A friend of mine has both. The nvidia cards seem to show the smoke/fog/particle effects much better. ATI  really slipped here for some reason.

Filtering kills the 3870 check tom's review on the 9600 GT

Filtering kills the 3870 check tom's review on the 9600 GT

Filtering kills the 3870 check tom's review on the 9600 GT

^ at triple post  .

@OP: keep in mind that the 3870 has a better cooling system, and ATI cards usually get better image quality (an obvious exception is what swifty_morgan mentioned, although potentially that could be an isolated incident). But like L1qu1d said, filtering hurts the 3870s performance.

It's exactly the same. Nothing more to say.

like 9600gt, it gets 182percent performance in SLI compared to single card.  
What about the 3870? Is it as efficient?

It's the same. SLI and Crossfire are basically the same thing by competing companies. Between those two, I'd choose 3870, because the superior x38 chipset supports Crossfire and not SLI. You get to highly overclock your cpu this way. If you don't oc, it doesn't matter either way.

It might make more sense to get 8800gt, which performs significantly better than either 9600gt or 3870 for relatively small cost increase. It's the best bang for the buck.

And keep in mind that "182%" is just boasting. In most games under realistic conditions, the performance for SLI/Crossfire is far lower.

Btw, I am running an AMD system. Is 790FX a good overclocker?
If I am gonna buy a 9600gt I'll wait for the 750i

Depends on on if you want to play Crysis. The 9600 GTs will give you much better performance here... should be more than enough in all other games with either solution.

That was generally the case until the release of the Geforce 8 series.

Like most comparisons like this.. Each card setup will trade blows depending on the game. Basically the setups are equal. Knowing that.. I would recommend the CF setup as the ATI cards have better features than the 9600's and have cooling fans than move the air out of the case. Also.. if the 7-Series is anything to judge by.. the 9600's may not look so good in a year or 2..

LOl sorry I was on Utorrent and I kept clicking the button LMAO didn't even see it! ahahahaha

Both good options IMO just depending if you want an Intel chipset mobo or SLI mobo.  They should each win a fair share of games.  You can check this 9600GT SLI review as it includes the HD3870X2 anyway.  
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] /page3.asp

If i were you dont bother with sli or cf rather go with 1 single powerful card.
New games have issues with sli and cf so your going to be frustrated at new released games.
But if you chose to do sli or cf go with cf because drivers appear faster from amd/ati.

 
I was basing my statement on what I've heard from many different forum users on their personal experience with 8800s and 3800s. I confess I haven't actually used them myself, but many people have said that the colors with recent ATI cards are richer than the 8800s. Can anyone else confirm this?

yes I can. And I can confirm that the Texture and picture quality is much richer on the 9800 GX2's than the 9600 GT's. (I had the 9600 GT in SL!)
 
ATI was reigning champ up until Nvidia released the 8 series. But I did hear that there was a situation where nvidia lower it's picture quality for the 8 series during benchmarks to show it as much better than the ATI 2900 XT.  
 
This was August 2007, it was in Maximum pc and on every site, I'm sure you can find it if you search google.

What I had heard was that with the 3870 Ati retook the IQ crown.... but I never saw tests as conclusive as the ones that we saw when the 2900 came out. So until we get a really detailed comparison its hard to measure how big the difference is.