A week back, we looked at the HD3870 and 8800GT cards now that they've been available for a while and drives matured. We found out that the 8800GT was the card of choice but ended the article by promising a showdown of these cards in dual card modes. Today we do just that- compare the 8800GT in SLI mode to the HD3870 in Crossfire mode. Lets find out if AMD can turn the tables.

Lets get right into- here is the testbed that was used. Since SLI requires an nVidia chipset, we have tested the 8800GT SLI using the latest XFX 780 chipset based motherboard with Corsair DDR2-1066MHz memory modules. Yes, DDR3 on the Intel platform is technically faster, but real life performance between high-end DDR2 and current DDR3 modules isn't really much different.

Testbed

CPU:	Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz
Memory:	2 x 1GB OCZ DDR3-1600MHz, 1 x 1GB Corsair DD2-1066MHz Memory Modules
Motherboard:	ASUS P5E3, XFX 780
Optical/Hard Drives:	Generic 8X DVDRW, Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB Cache SATA
Monitor:	BENQ 24" LCD with 1920x1200 Resolution
Operating System:	Windows Vista Ultimate - 32bit
Drivers:	Latest Intel Chipset and nVidia Forceware Drivers

Also, the way we have compared benchmarks in the upcoming pages are slightly different than we usually do. What we have done is compared Corssfire with a single 3870 card and SLI with a single 8800GT card. This shows us, percentage-wise, how the dual card setup compares to a single card setup. Of course the results of SLI and Crossfire can also be compared directly to each other as the same games, resolution and hardware is used (with the exception of motherboard and memory as noted above).

Benchmarks

Future Mark:	Latest versions of 3DMark 2003, 3DMark 2005 and 3DMark 2006 running at default settings
Company of Heroes:	Direct-X 10. Using built-in benchmark
Crysis:	Direct-X 10: Built-in benchmark
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars:	Direct-X 9, using Custom timedemo
F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate:	Direct-X 9: Built-in benchmark
Half Life 2 Episode 2:	Direct-X 9: Custom timedemo
Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions:	Direct-X 10: Built-in benchmark
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:	Direct-X 9: Using timedemo
Unreal Tournament 3:	Direct-X 9, Using custom timedemo
Word in Conflict:	Direct-X 10 built-in benchmark

If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com