Fact 1:

At newegg, one can purchase two 8800 GT's for a total of $420, while a single 3870 X2 costs $440.

Fact2:

According to that Anandtech review, two 8800 GT's SLI perform better than a single 3870 X2.

Conclusion: two 8800 GT's kick 3870 X2's ass badly. Even when ATI's drivers begin receiving better support (if they will), this wont ever make a single 3870 X2 outperform two 8800 GT's, but maybe get really closer.

Fact 3:

If I overclock a Q6600 to 3.6 Ghz, I will have duo-like clock speeds while at the same time having two more cores. If I overclock the most powerful duo right now out there, say to 4.5 Ghz, the performance gain in games between 3.6 Ghz and 4.5 Ghz is almost unnoticeable, just like 60+ FPS begins to be unnoticeable. Now if a play a quad enabled game on a Q6600 at 3.6 Ghz, I would get unmatched performance.

Thanks.

[QUOTE="Fignewton50"]

Crysis and World in Conflict are prime examples of this problem :( I mean you just need to take a look at any world in conflict benchmark with the R600 and you can see exactly what hardware the game was truly aimed towards that its a disgrace to the industry.

Its business I guess but it still sucks ;)

bandieramonte

Really? Crysis and WiC are optimized for who? For Nvidia or ATI? Which are the latest games that are most optimized for playing with Nvidia cards? I ask this because a month and 1/2 ago I bought two 8800 GTS G92 cards and would like to play the best games for me.

Thanks.

Anybody?

Crysis and World in Conflict are prime examples of this problem :( I mean you just need to take a look at any world in conflict benchmark with the R600 and you can see exactly what hardware the game was truly aimed towards that its a disgrace to the industry.

Its business I guess but it still sucks ;)

Fignewton50

Really? Crysis and WiC are optimized for who? For Nvidia or ATI? Which are the latest games that are most optimized for playing with Nvidia cards? I ask this because a month and 1/2 ago I bought two 8800 GTS G92 cards and would like to play the best games for me.

Thanks.

After reading through all the posts of this thread, I've got some things to share:

1) Generally speaking, even though you get a lot of RAM for vista, say 4 gb, it will never perform as well as XP does.

2) How is it possible for games to look better in XP than on Vista? I don't think this is possible. The ONLY exception is Crysis, and only because there is a tweaking method one can do in XP files to simulate DX10. After this, it would look about the same as on vista, but never better... And for the rest of the games, it would always look better in Vista because of DX10.

3) Continuing my previous point, of course that games will always perform better in Xp. One thing is performance and other thing is image quality.

Summing all this up, I would only use XP in order to play Crysis at DX10. For the rest, Vista. There is no such application that demands as much as Crysis does. For the rest of the programs, the performance loss between vista and Xp is insignificant, if not, minimal.

[QUOTE="Thinker_145"]Ya and i dont really see this as a return to high end.

2 8800GT's cost almost the same and even if these numbers are exxagerated for whatever reason,it's pretty clear that this card wont be crushing GT's in SLI.Sure you would need an SLI board but's it.Both require beefy PSU's.

And the reason why a single card is better than 2 cards of the same power because you dont have to deal with the issues and support of dual cards.But with this 3870X2 that's not the case.

The_Fell_One

The 3870x2 and two 8800GT'ss in SLI are not the same price point. The MSRP on the 8800GT is $279.99 the MSRP on the 3870x2 is $450. That would mean two 8800GT's cost $110 more than the 3870x2. So... pretty much Thinker doesn't want to accept that maybe ATI has a good card. You don't need to crush a graphics solution that costs over $100 more.

Two 8800 GT's cost more than a single 3870 X2, while at the same time perform better. So the real question is which if these have the best price/performance ratio?

While two 8800 GT's cost a total of $500 (EVGA at newegg) and one 3870 X2 costs an average of $450, meaning 11% less, the former (according to anandtech) performs an average of roughly 15% better. (I tried to make the tedious math by myself analyzing every bench of anandtech, this value could be more or less)

So here you got it: two 8800 GT's cost 11% more and perform 15% better.

Conclusion: two 8800 GT's have a better price performance ratio, while at the same time perform better than a single 3870 X2.

[QUOTE="bandieramonte"]

I found this additional source reviewing the 3870 X2 against Nvidia's best video cards.

http://www.fpslabs.com/reviews/video/amd-radeon-hd-3870-x2-review

How reliable this source is, I don't know. But if I assume this is reliable, and then combine these benchmarks with the one posted earlier on this thread, I can get a simple conclusion:

By now, 3870 X2 is slightly beaten by at least the 8800 GTS G92 ONLY in TWIMTBP games. You can see that by yourselves by watching the benches on games like BioSchock, Crysis, and Company of Heroes, which are supposedly more supported by Nvidia. On the rest of the games, 3870 X2 is the best performer.

This leads me to a final conclusion: when ATI begins to improve driver support (If and only if they do so) then it's VERY probable that this 3870 X2 card will be the king. BUT, the upcoming 9800 X2 may threaten to steal 3870 X2's throne. That, wait we must to see... And this is 3870 X2 VS single Nvidia's GPU's.

Only one last thing to add: 3870 X2 is practically and technically 2 GPU's. So I think that the real benching would be against 8800 GTS G92 SLI. If a single 8800 GTS G92 slightly beats 3870 X2 on TWIMTBP games, then this one on SLI will still beat 3870 X2 even when ATI improves driver support, I think. And in the rest of the games, even though I haven't seen any comparisons with the SLI mode, I guess that it would be on par with the 3870 X2.

All this is my newbie opinion because I'm relatively new to all this hardware stuff.

Thanks.

The_Fell_One

It would be completely unreasonable to compare the 3870x2 to two 8800 GTS G92 chips in SLI, since the price point for that kind of setup would be somewhere around $600 - $700 depending on the brand of the 8800GTS and what kind of deal you're getting. The 3870x2 is $200-$300 less than that.

Exactly, but anyways, I would like to know which offers better performance, a 3870 X2 or 2x 8800 GTS G92 SLI. Which one is the best average performer?

I found this additional source reviewing the 3870 X2 against Nvidia's best video cards.

http://www.fpslabs.com/reviews/video/amd-radeon-hd-3870-x2-review

How reliable this source is, I don't know. But if I assume this is reliable, and then combine these benchmarks with the one posted earlier on this thread, I can get a simple conclusion:

By now, 3870 X2 is slightly beaten by at least the 8800 GTS G92 ONLY in TWIMTBP games. You can see that by yourselves by watching the benches on games like BioSchock, Crysis, and Company of Heroes, which are supposedly more supported by Nvidia. On the rest of the games, 3870 X2 is the best performer.

This leads me to a final conclusion: when ATI begins to improve driver support (If and only if they do so) then it's VERY probable that this 3870 X2 card will be the king. BUT, the upcoming 9800 X2 may threaten to steal 3870 X2's throne. That, wait we must to see... And this is 3870 X2 VS single Nvidia's GPU's.

Only one last thing to add: 3870 X2 is practically and technically 2 GPU's. So I think that the real benching would be against 8800 GTS G92 SLI. If a single 8800 GTS G92 slightly beats 3870 X2 on TWIMTBP games, then this one on SLI will still beat 3870 X2 even when ATI improves driver support, I think. And in the rest of the games, even though I haven't seen any comparisons with the SLI mode, I guess that it would be on par with the 3870 X2.

All this is my newbie opinion because I'm relatively new to all this hardware stuff.

Thanks.

Thanks a lot! It's almost been a month since I was trying to find exactly these benchmarks.

So, if 8800 GT SLI beat 3870 Crossfire, then 8800 GTS G92 SLI will fare even better! This really calms me because I lasted like a month deciding between this SLI or this crossfire mode.