I have seen Best Buy selling a visiontek 3870 for $129. NewEgg and Tigerdirect both have them around $150. The same cards were $229 3 months ago.

I have one now, but i was wondering, how cheap does everyone think they will get with the 48xx and GTX2xx coming out this summer.

I know a lot of you will say, wait and get one of the new better cards. I don't want to spend $250 on a 4870 or GTX260 when i have a 1 month old 3870. I will wait until early '09 to get a 4870 or GTX. Then the price will be corrected after the first 6 month price bump from low supply. Just humor me.

At what price would it be worth throwing a second 3870 in xfire?

They won't get much cheaper any more. I think they will discontinue them first. Once they get to a point that they are no longer profitable they will stop making them and resellers might sell them cheaper to get rid of stock. OR sell them at a hight brick because of demand for a discontinued card.

$129 would be a good price to do Xfire. I'd do it now so you can enjoy it.

If the 4850's gonna be $200, it's no surprise the 3870 may drop to the 100-110 line.

^ if the 4850 is $200 you may want to sell the 3870 and get a 4850. I'd weigh the option

Omg, wtf is this, 3870 for $129... In the UK the cheapest you can get one is £105 which is around $200. How unfair.

so far this is what i am thinking. The 48xx should be out soon, i can wait a few more weeks. I may miss the sell at best buy, but there will be other sells. I wont buy a 48xx when it comes out, but it will give me an idea of prices so i can make a more informed choice.

Late summer, i think we will see a fire sell to get rid of the 38xx stock.

I have an x1900XTX before my 8800GTS. I looked at Crossfiring the card. Those you need a specific Crossfire card to do the setup. The cost was cheaper than a new card, but I'd need a new PSU and it came in just under a single 8800GTS. So I sold it for $120 on ebay and got the GTS. I like a single card solution better. It sucks less power. But if you can do it cheaper than selling and buying a new card and get the performance you would with a newer card, do it. Just look at the cost and the performance you will get with both options.

I just purchased the $129 Visiontek 3870 OC card from Best Buy. I'm going to add it to my 3870x2....

FYI for anyone interested: The Visiontek card comes with the ZEROTherm heat pipe cooler (815 I think) and not the reference cooler shown in the ad.

On the way home i bought the second card. Total, after tax $280 for 2 3870's in crossfire is awesome. I bought the first card 3 weeks ago on sell for $179. I got $54 back on price guarantee then bought the second one for $129.

Both are the visiontek 3870 OC 512M from best buy.

4 weeks ago i had a 7600gt with a pentium d 920. Now (see sig). Wow what a difference good hardware can make.

With one 3870 i got a 3dmark of 11,700 now with 2 3870's i am getting 16,800. COD4 i was getting 80FPS mostly some medium some high settings, now i am getting 90fps + with max AF, max AA, all ATI/CCC on quality, 1440x900, all game setting on high.
I really didnt think it would make that big a difference, but i did read the 3870 scales up better in xfire for high AA settings.

now i need vista(DX10) and crysis to see what it would look like.

What really counts is how happy you are with your performance. All the what ifs? shoulda woulda couldas in the world don't make up for being happy with results. Good deal !

One day it will sell for a dollar and no one will buy it.

This is my first real gaming rig. So i am tinkering with it, the e7200 oc, crossfire, etc. So i am just playing a little. But yes i am thoroughly enjoying it. I have never been able to play a resolution over 1024x768 and usually had to play with AA off. IT is nice to see the eye candy and still have a playable framerate.

I hope i dont sound like i am bragging. I just wanted to spread the joy. LOL.

My machine is still a sub $1000 rig. There are a lot of machines that are much more powerful.

I installed the Visiontek card last night, and after a few reboots to get my displays straightend out, I had CrossfireX working. I ran 3DMark06 to compare to the single 3870x2, and I got 18,800 or so. A little lower than I thought but it's really not that important at the stock res. I cranked it up to 1920x1200, 4xAA, 8xAF and the PC rebooted somewhere before the test finished. From what I saw thoght it was running as fast as the 1280x1024 res. I will bring the OC down on the cards a bit and see if that was the cause.

For the price I'm happy

^Yep, good for you. Try Assassin's Creed if you have SP2 for Vista.

romulus, SP1 just came out, Are you already waiting upon SP2?

Sorry, typo, i mean SP1

Assasins Creed looks good, but everything I've read about it points to a loss of interest before long because of very repetitive game play. I would be interested to run the game with the original version which takes advantage of DX10.1. It's supposed to run well on ATI hardware. Maybe I'll try the demo...

I just bought this card from Best Buy last Tuesday for $129 to replace my 18 month old 7600GT. However, I am not getting the performance I'd like to see. I did a 3dMark06 and only registered a 3985 which seems way too low (edited see below).

I have an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor (200 Mhz) and 4GB RAM (800Mhz) on a decent MSI motherboard. There is an obvious performance jump from my old video card but I think something in my system is holding me back.

My gut reaction in comparison to the expected performance of card like this, my performance in normal games should probably be higher as well (for the sake of comparing it to Futuremark stand-alone).

Has anyone any ideas on what this could be?

Can the (below) average processor really drop the overall performance of a moderate system?

I've spent over $200 on the memory and video card upgrades and can drop another $100 on a processor if it is a hardware matter, but I wonder if it is a software issue?

Edit: I didn't know this, but my multiplier on CPU at default was at x5 vs. x10; therefore all 3dMark results nearly double with the exception of the 3rd graphic application which was a 1.5x increase.

New 3D Mark Score: 7649. Therefore, if I changed the BIOS to x10 to double my processor capacity and everything doubled in the 3D Mark 06, it appears that I would be running at full capacity and my 3800+ @10x may be bottlenecking the system.

If I go to the AMD Black 5000+, will that yield an approximate 5000/3800 = 32%?