We tested an overclocked Sapphire HD 3870 X2 card running at 864MHz. The card is water-cooled and it runs 20°C cooler than reference card. We tried to overclock it, successfully, and it brought a 5% improvement in the games we tested. We managed to hit 905MHz core speed with memory at 2040MHz.
As we were not happy with the cooler noise we were playing with some other Radeon 3870 X2 bioses and we managed to make our card completely silent. We got the fan speed down, the card was still stable at over 900MHz overclocked speed and we finally got what we wanted. We are talking to Sapphire to make this bios public so you can make your card quiet.
Testbed:
Our testing system is not the one you’ve seen on the previous page, and it consists of:
Motherboard:
EVGA 680i SLI (Provided by EVGA)
Processor:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition (Provided by Intel)
Memory:
OCZ FlexXLC PC2 9200 5-5-5-18 (Provided by OCZ)
during testing CL5-5-5-15-CR2T 1066MHz at 2.2V
PSU:
OCZ Silencer 750 Quad Black ( Provided by OCZ)
Hard disk:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB SATA (Provided by Seagate)
CPU-Cooler:
Freezer 7 Pro (Provided by Artic Cooling)
Case Fans:
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 12 PWM
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 8 PWM
Futuremark
Water-cooled Atomic HD 3870 X2 card didn’t score significantly better than reference HD 3870 X2 card, but it was the coolest card on our test.
Gaming
In Company of Heroes, the Atomic card outperformed Geforce 9800 GTX cards, but didn’t fare that well in the rest of the games. Antialiasing really brings Radeon’s scores down, and that’s even clearer in the next game.
Unlike Crysis, F.E.A.R. really liked the dual-chip card, and we ended up seeing some great performance scaling compared to a single HD 3870 card.
Conclusion
Once again, Sapphire proved that they’ve got what it takes and delivered an interesting product. Atomic is already a well-known and popular brand among enthusiasts, and the water-cooled HD 3870 X2 Atomic is simply unique among Radeons. You get the complete water cooling system made of the pump/radiator/reservoir, and the card is ready for some serious tasks straight out of the box.
Mounting the cooling box can prove to be somewhat of a problem in some of the smaller cases, but also depends on the other computer components, mostly the size of CPU coolers. Once you set it up, the Atomic card will surprise you. The core runs at least 20°C cooler than reference, and the card comes pre-overclocked to 864MHz.
The bad side of Atomic HD 3870 X2 is its noise, and it was louder than reference on plenty of occasions. Still, you can easily overclock it without worrying about overheating your GPU. Without modded bios we managed to solve this issue.
With 1GB of memory and two RV670 cores, this card can take anything you throw at it. The packaging is excellent, and you’ll get it in the best graphics card case we’ve ever seen.
The greatest downside to this card is probably the price, but if you want a card that's different, then Atomic HD 3870 X2 is more than a good choice. Sapphire’s reference design card is one of the cheapest HD 3870 X2 cards we’ve found, and it will set you back around €280, compared to the Atomic version that’s scarcely available at over €400.