on a single 3870 i scored 11308 in 3dmark 06 which i thought was pretty impresive for a card costing less than £140 but after fitting a second in crossfire it scored 13648, anyone know if this sounds about right the rest of the system is asus p5e q6600@ stock 2gb ram Geil Black Dragon PC2-8500 1066Mhz 2x gigabyte ati 3870 500gb spinpoint hard drive corsiar hx620 psu
That's a bit less than I would expect, but not significantly. First, SLI/Crossfire don't provide double the performance of a single card - in some tasks the boost can be as low as 30%. Second, artificial benchmarks aren't a particularly good indicator of anything at all - try comparing framerates in a few games between the two modes and see what you get. Finally, is that your overall score or your graphics score? If it's your overall score, bear in mind there are a lot of other parts in the computer which have not been changed.
Yes those scores sound exactly right to me. Adding a second card for SLI or CrossFire has an effect which can vary depending upon the game and settings. On average I'd expect you to have a 20-30% perf gain over a single card but in some games it can be nothing (or less). The 3870-X2 (or 3870 CrossFire) tends to bring the perf from just below an 8800GT for the single card right up to 8800GTS/GTX levels when they are in CrossFire. HTH.
TBH dual graphics setup's tend to only really shine when the resolution is set really high. if your using a screen above a 22in then SLI and Crossfire tends to be handy if you like all the settings in games set very high. i use a 8800GTS 320MB on my 24in screen, and if my mobo was capable of SLI id snap up another 8800GTS 320MB and SLI them.
ive allways been a nvidia fanboy before and this is the first ati card that i have ever bought, must admit the image quality is superb
I've heard a lot of whispering about a significant image quality difference between the two brands, but I've never seen any concrete evidence. Can you explain a bit more?
It depends what you mean by image quality. If you mean the quality of the signal being sent to the display then ATi had a big upper hand back in the days of the GeForce 2 and 3 but it steadily become a non-factor. Some cards also had issues with sub-standard DVI ports but again we're talking early days by today's standards, eg GeForce 5 (FX). For any remotely modern cards this type of image quality should be a non-issue even for the most picky. In terms of quality of the rendered image and special effects such as AA/AF things have been improving with each new generation and DX10 seems to have really stabilised things. There were lots of little issues even right up to GeForce 8 but TBH you generally had to make comparisons side by side to stand a chance of noticing any real difference. Finally drivers from both companies are now very equal so weird quirks and incompatibilities are pretty much a non-issue, early Vista drivers aside. Bottom line, don't worry about it!
what i mean is from what i have seen on other peoples machines that have been using nvidia gtx,ultra, and 8800gt sli and my old 8800gts 640mb compared to these ati 3870's the colours look a bit washed out, i find the ati's screen image that much more vibrant and detailed, ive read that they dont do aa very well but i cant say that i have noticed much and im begining to think that frames per second is not the be all and end all, one instance that springs to mind is in the gaming section there is a thread on gears of war and someone has included some screenshots and i could not help but notice the quality of the picture looked so much better than what i was getting with my 8800 gts, looking at his sig i noticed he was useing an ati x1950xt and at first i put it down to that he must have a better monitor but i can now say that after i switched to the 3870's i tried gears of war and my picture quality looks as good if not better, now im no expert and untill now i have allways been a nvidia fanboy but i can only judge on what i have seen and the conclusion that i have come to is maybe the ati cards are a bit slower but damn they do look better
It would be interesting for someone to do some comparison screenshots between the two brands. The only ATI I own is an elderly 9600, so I don't have anything to compare with. Maybe the kind staff of bit-tech could do such a comparison.
Just about everyone who changes from NVIDIA cards to ATi notices a nice improvement in image quality. No idea why that is so...but it does make me preferential to ATi
HERE'S a great review regarding the gains from Crossfire and SLI based on the 3870 and 8800GT cards. I'd point out are that some other games will show zero gains from dual-card setups. Also do note the fps achieved as anything 100+ or < 40 are irrelevant. A good example is Crysis where the lowest resolution tested was 1680x1050 where even the fastest setup only achieves 22.5fps average (without AA/AF), totally unplayable and the fact there's a 62% gain (from 14fps) is meaningless. Even so it illustrates that both SLI and Crossfire have come a long way and gains in the games tested are often 40-80% (at relevant fps).
colour differences are purely down to defaults that each brand comes with out of the box, its like all these PS3 vs Xbox comparo thing you see on the web configure the display properly with what ever device you are using and they will look the same, the days in the past when there were significant differences between NV and ATi filtering algorithms are long gone.
im not so sure, after messing about with monitor callibration tools to get the best picture quailty with my samsung 22" and 8800gts 640mb i was never 100% happy with the results and in the end put it down to mabe the monitor was not realy that good, now after connecting the 3870 to the samsung with exactly the same settings im more than pleased with the image qaulity, but who knows mabe im right or mabe im wrong and its a figment of my imagination, sandy perhaps at the next lan we could do a ati and nvidia comparsison and vote on it
as for me not a big increase from crosfire , but still you pay for 2 cards.... one 11k,another 3k....
well i raised the fsb on the q6600 to 2.7ghz and the 3dmark 06 jumped to 15050, so stopped looking into too much with these scores
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Guides/cpu_bottlenecks/ Very interesting article regarding CPU scaling; just how much CPU power do we need for these gfx cards to fly? It uses a C2D E6700 clocked between 1.6ghz and 3ghz. Synthetic benchmarks like 3Dmark are only good for comparisons and setup tweaking but actual games is what really counts.
