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The MSI RX3870 - Radeon HD3870 with 512MB of DDR4 ram ... Is it enough to attract the high-end gamers? 

INTRODUCTION 

AMD/ATI have had it's fair share of problems last year in 2007. Firstly, there was the AMD-ATI merger ... which was a shock to everyone in the I.T. industry, plus the fact that it didn't exactly go smoothly either, with lots of resignations from the ATI camp. Then there was the delay of their next generation GPUs. Nvidia saw this as an opportunity to expand their market share and take full advantage of their demise. And lastly, their recent bugs which were reportedly found on their newly released Phenom quad core processors. All-in-all, not a very good year for AMD/ATI.

But hey, life goes on ... and AMD/ATI have released their much delayed RV670 GPU in the form of the Radeon HD3870. This new GPU is produced using 55nm technology and offers 320 stream processing units, 256-bit memory interface, GDDR4 ram, support for DX10.1, a GPU core clock of 800Mhz with a memory clock of 2.25Ghz. It all sounds very impressive ... but will it be enough to compete with Nvidia's dominance.

It's difficult to say, but with the performance of Nvidia's Geforce 8800 cards and the ease of setting up a SLI rig (2 x Nvidia Geforce cards), it's no wonder Nvidia is dominating the high-end gaming market. Mind you, you need a motherboard that can support SLI ... which is currently only limited to Nvidia chipset based motherboards. Another fact you might also want to consider, is that SLI setups do not offer the best price/performance ratio. And to be honest ... I personally don't think it's worth it.

For the high-end, extreme gamer ... a more interesting setup which could be more appealing is AMD/ATI's Crossfire mode (2 x Radeon grahic cards). According to existing Crossfire users ... it actually offers better price/performance ratio than Nvidia's SLI. More intrerestingly, Crossfire capability is available on most Intel and AMD chipset based motherboards. In other words, there's more motherboards available on the market that can support Crossfire mode.

First-tier manufacturers like MSI have always enjoyed the benefits of being one of the very first to take newly released technologies to the market. Being close partners with Intel, AMD/ATI and Nvidia, you can be sure that MSI will have something for the masses. The RX3870 from MSI is based on AMD/ATI's HD8370 reference designs. So, we can expect a more conservative result in our benchmark tests.

There's already been reviews on the net, showing a lacklustre performance of the Radeon HD3870 against Nvidia's Geforce 8800GT (G92). But one have to remember, the current cost of the Radeon HD3870 is almost 20% cheaper than the Geforce 8800GT. If that's the case, that would give the Radeon HD3870 a better price/performance ratio. But the question is ... do we take the Radeon HD3870 and treat it as a high-end enthusiast gaming card, or do we just look at it as a mainstream gaming card?

OK, let's take a closer look at the MSI RX3870 and see how well it plays some DX10 games ...