AMD/ATI to release 3850 x2 card

[wonderlust]

http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?p=428371#post428371

[00mike000]

would it be possible for them to do a agp version of the x2 since they done the 3750agp or wont it be possible due to other reasons?

[Lynx]

They will not do an X2 version, as most people on AGP busses have single core cpus, so the best cards will be single on AGP.

[Mul.]

There isn't really any reason to launch such a card on AGP. I'm sure the internal crossfire bridge would be limited to PCI-Express anyway surely?

As mentioned, many AGP systems simply can't take advantage of such a card. I'm even surprised that a HD 3850 made it to AGP as only a small fraction of AGP gamers (calling all heavily clocked Athlon 64 X2 AGP machines) can make decent use of such cards.

Nice to see another X2 card on it's way. Though it makes me wonder how much cheaper it'd be. Suppose it depends on the yields of the RV670 core but really the only difference would be a core and mem frequency reduction.

[00mike000]

i hate using a old generation of technology and i want to upgrade but parents wont let me :sad:

[wonderlust]

I suppose these X2 cards are going to be better on a P35 system than running Xfire?

Am I correct in thinking all P35s are 16x + 4x for xfire?

[Mul.]

Yeah, all P35's are 16x/4x crossfire based.

Assuming this internal crossfire bridge chip allows both to run at 16x simultaneously, I guess it could perform a bit better than dual 3850/3870's on a P35 Crossfire board. By how much, I don't know. Depends on how badly performance is capped by a PCI-E slot that's electrically 4x.



i hate using a old generation of technology and i want to upgrade but parents wont let me :(

That's a bit of a shame. But as I said earlier, a card like this would most definitely be held back by AGP generation hardware.

[Lynx]

This card is best suited to single slot boards for two reasons, the 2nd xfire slot wont be full 16x, so this card like the x2 3870 are actually faster in many cases.