Author: Chris Hunter

Keeping with tradition, the continent of Asia has more breaking news information about a new video card. Pconline.com.cn has obtained an AMD-ATi Radeon HD 3870X2 Retail graphics card. In addition, they are putting it up against the 768MB 8800 Ultra for some serious competition.

The HD 3870X2 has two RV670 cores, each with its own 256-bit 512MB memory interface. The RAM is Samsung 1ns GDDR3 chips, and both interfaces run at 1.8GHz. The 55nm cores run at 825MHz, which is the fastest default clock rate for a GPU. There are a combined total of 640 stream processors, 32 texture units, and 32 Render Back-ends (raster operators).

The card has a teraflop of processing power running on a PCIE2.0 bus interface. AMD includes the latest 3D standards, such as DX 10.1. The RV630/610 hardware decoder handles the UVD tasks. PowerPlay technology, from ATi, controls clock rates on the fly, and can increase idle efficiency by lowering the idle GPU down to 300MHz.

 
The independent RV670s connect together through a 48-lane PEX 8547 PCI Express switch. The switch has a latency of 110ns in-between cores and can handle packets as large as a kilobyte. PLX 's device is compatible with all normal PCIE power standards, which enables PowerPlay to set power states. This switch combined with Pulse-Width Modulation makes for a robust and stable infrastructure for the two RV670s.