As of Sunday afternoon, three HD3870 X2 cards have been listed on geizhals.eu, our beloved European price search engine.

MSI has the highest clocked card, with both of the GPUs running at 850MHz and the memory at 900MHz (1,800MHz effectively). Fudo already wrote about this card, here. As expected, the highest clocked card gets the highest list price, as the MSI's RX3870X2-R2D1G-OC 1GB (V803-298R) is listed at €429 here.

Club3D and PowerColor are offering reference clocked cards, running at 825/900MHz. Club3D's X2 is currently listed at €379 here, while the PowerColor card costs €391 here.

Although paying almost €400 for a graphics card isn't exactly a bargain for most consumers, you should keep in mind that Nvidia's soon to be discontinued 8800 Ultra is listed at €500+. The new Radeon HD 3870 X2 should outperform the Ultra in most cases, and at these prices it's looking like a pretty good deal.

The majority of HD3870 cards retail from around €172 to €200. However, the vast majority of these sub €200 cards are reference clocked, 775MHz to be exact, although the memory speed of these cards is a lot higher, 1,125MHz (2,250MHz effectively). In other words, compared to a two card CrossFire setup the X2 offers higher GPU clocks out of the box, but as of right now we're not sure what the performance difference will be. Furthermore, we're hoping that X2 prices will drop slightly as soon as more of them become available.

For the first time in over a year, ATI has the fastest high-end graphics card on the market, but Nvidia's 9800 GX2 is just around the corner and ATI will probably be dethroned as soon as it becomes available. In spite of that, it's highly unlikely that Nvidia will be able to match ATI's aggressive pricing in this particular market segment.