Introduction

It's one of those cards we've heard about quite a bit, but often when it comes to these dual GPU models they're nothing more than a bit of a prototype. Sometimes they manage to also hit the media and on the rare occasion they actually go into mass production for all to get their hands on it.

The HD 3870 X2 is here, and it's coming to suppliers. Stock's available from launch day and there should be plenty to go around. The question is; why has AMD bothered making the HD 3870 X2?

The most logical answer is with the release of the next generation cards from both AMD and NVIDIA being just around the corner, it's time for another famous core dump. Generally this happens in two forms; the first is to release a new model that is cheaper but pretty much offers the same performance as the current top end card. The other is to strap two cores to one card and sell it for a competitive price. Both ideas are generally a good way of getting rid of old cores.

So it's clear that AMD have gone down the path of the latter. The first option is usually a safer one, it's pretty hard to fault a card that is cheaper yet is at the same speed as the top card, but when you go down this path you add a new price point into the market. In this case we should see around $600AUD.

Currently nothing sits at around that price point; the 8800GTS 512MB is pretty much NVIDIA's most expensive card on the market and that starts at the low $400AUD area. The only time you can manage to climb up and over the $500AUD mark is when you look at high overclocked cards from companies like BFG and ASUS.

Well, I think we've said just about everything that has to be said in relation to this card; the particular card we're looking at today is the GECUBE HD 3870 X2 so let's go and check out the package.