Looking at the rear of the card you can see the pair of 'X' brackets that are used to hold the heatsink in place and the black aluminum frame that not only adds to the cards stability but also cools the memory modules that are mounted on the rear of the 3870 X2.

Included with the Sapphire HD3870 have a 6-pin connector with a Molex connector on the opposite end so that you can power the video card.  Next up is the composite leads that morph into the an S-Video connector.  Just in case your monitor does not have DVI cable on it they also provide a DVI to VGA adapter and beside it you have the DVI to HDMI connector which you can use to connector your system to HD-Television.

The software bundles supplied with most video cards in this day and age are pretty lame, it seems most of the time the software maker is just trying to dump last year's software.  That is not the case with the bundle that Sapphire provides, in the carton you will find full working copies of  PowerDVD 7, Futuremark 3DMark06 and The Black Box with Half Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress.

Test System & Setup

System Used

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.5Ghz
Memory: 4GB Crucial Tech. (DDR2-667 DDR2 SDRAM)
Motherboard: EVGA 780i SLI
Disk Drive: NEC DVD_RW ND3540A
Hard Drive: Hitachi E7K500 SATAII
Monitor: Acer AL2216 (1650X1280, 1280x1024)
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate x64


Graphics Card:

Sapphire HD3870 X2

Drivers:

ATI Catalyst 8.451.2-080 (HD3870 X2)
ATI Catalyst 8.1
Nvidia 169.25

Applications Used:

3DMark06 Professional
Call of Juarez
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Half Life 2: Episode 2
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Prey
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea
World in Conflict

3DMark06 is still the old standby to see just how well your system is performing  Rather than use the usual graphs, this time we just ran the system for a full cycle and then compared the two scores together.  It is very obvious that the HD3870X2 kicks the 3850s when run in Crossfire configuration.

For those of you not familiar with Company of Heroes it is top-down real time strategy game where you have the option of playing either the Allies or Axis in game that is very similar in style to all of the Command and Conquer series of games.  The game can really work your system when your game contains a great deal of resources and the you enter a battle situation.