INQ reveals the R680, Radeon HD 3870 X2

IN FEBRUARY 2004, a game appeared from nowhere. The name of that game was Far Cry, and it transformed a small team from Germany into international gaming megastars.

It spurred a graphics card bonanza, one repeated by by Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, with the market massively going for Athlon 64+Nforce3/4 systems with Geforce 6800GT, 6800 Ultra for high-end and Geforce 6600 for mainstream.

Now the circle has turned again, with the release of Hellgate: London, Gears of War, Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis. The time to get a new computer is now, and if you're asking yourself what would be the best $500 present under the Christmas tree, answer is two 8800GT or two 3870s, not an 8800GTX or 8800Ultra.

But, if you're willing to wait, this is what AMD has in store for January release.

Please allow me to introduce myself, my name is HD 3870 X2...

RV670 times two, 512MB GDDR4 memory times two, DVI-HDMI adapter - times two, DisplayPort... erm...

As you can see, this longer board is on the trail of the 8800GTX/Ultra PCB. Unusually, there is no significant increase in the height of the board, meaning this dual-GPU card will fit it a more compact chassis.

The price of 3870 X2 will be between 399 and 499 USD/EUR, 249 and 299 quids (yes, life sucks in Bligthy).

RV670 chips are working at 750+ MHz each. 775 MHz should be reachable by launch time. Who knows, maybe even 800 MHz for the GPU. When it comes to overclocking, we have no idea at the moment, but the memory should be able to work at 2.25 GHz, yielding in combined bandwidth of 144 GB/s. Not too shabby.

Also, with R680, AMD is hoping to finally close the circle the compnay opened with Rage Fury MAXX. This card was hailed by none other than Dave Orton as the first multi-GPU product. But as we all know, there was a small company called 3dfx that did that some years before ATI kicked in. The only problem that Rage Fury MAXX had, was the fact that if you chose to use Windows 2000, Windows XP, or just about any operating system other than Win98/Me, you'd be sitting dead in the water.

With two RV670s inside, owners of this card will have a future since this board will come to market as 3870 X2 and FireStream 9170 X2, albeit with double or quadruple amount of memory (probably GDDR3, not GDDR4). R700 is also bringing MCM concept in the world of GPUs, so we're heading to one very, very interesting year.

Bear in mind that the G92_300 series, or D8E, the GeForce 8850GX2 or 8950GX2, whatever Nvidia marketeers figure it out to be - is also a dual-chip board. It is widely expected that Nvidia's card will be the same as 7900GX2 and 7950GX2, or a dual-PCB connected with 20-or-so connecting pins, all working in harmony with Nvidia's BR04 chip.

Radeon HD 3850, 3870, Nvidia GeForce 8800GT (and soon new G92-based GTS), and now Radeon HD 3870 X2 and Nvidia GeForce 8xx0GX2. Life doesn't get boring in the 3D industry. µ