VisionTek ATI HD 3870 X2 OC Review

Thanks to the latest war between graphics giants, ATI and Nvidia, yesterday’s top card becomes a fantastic deal in a matter of days.  Such is the case with the VisionTek HD 3870 X2 Overclocked Edition.  The 3870 X2 represents the pinnacle of performance in the 3800 series buy packing two 3870 video processors and a whopping 1 GB of GDDR3 the pushing the whole package beyond the standard reference speeds for what results in  over 1 teraFLOPS of GPU computing power!

Not only is the VisionTek HD 3870 X2 Overclocked Edition blazing fast at gaming, this powerhouse card is targeted squarely at the HD crowd.  With Unified Video Decoder (UVD) built in, this card is ready to support the latest Blu-Ray technology right out of the box thanks to the included HDMI adapter and integrated 5.1 audio.

Today we will be taking a closer look at the Visiontek design for the 3870 X2 and how it compares to some of the most popular hardware on the market from NVIDIA as well.

As you can see the VisionTek is not just another reference clone.  Even the traditional heatsink has been upgraded to a massive copper quad heatpipe design.  This oversize cooling solution is complimented by two temperature controlled, variable speed 7.5cm fans.

This attractive cooling solution is held in place by 5 screws and will cool the 2 GPUs, memory and the PCIe bridge chip through a copper heatpipe system.  Despite the oversize look, these two fans are powered by the standard onboard 3 pin connectors.  The entire heatsink assembly takes up about the same amount of space as the reference two slot cooler.