Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2 

One reason to wait a bit with your purchase is that this month both AMD and NVIDIA will launch their new high-end products, which will certainly have very competitive performance and pricing.

Unfortunately the extra performance gained from the overclocks is not as big as one would expect, but still, it's the fastest X2 card.

For less experienced users who do not want to go into overclocking, but have a fat wallet, this is a great choice because it gives you high performance and the bragging rights of watercooling.

Sapphire's card uses higher clock speeds, an extra pump and a bigger fan which causes the total power draw to increase by about 10 Watts which isn't that much.

Both overclocks are good, I have a feeling that additional memory overclocks would be possible if the memory on the back of the card would be cooled as well.

Since the memory chips on the back of the card are not cooled it is understandable that Sapphire did not go with 0.8 ns chips here.

Still even about 10°C less helps improve the overclocking potential of the card.

This means that while overclocking memory, the chips on the back will get hotter and hotter and the ones on the front stay cool, effectively limiting the memory overclock.

If you want the best bang for the buck, then the Sapphire card is way too expensive.

With the latest price drops you can almost get two aircooled HD 3870 X2s for the price of one X2 Atomic.

Motherboard:Gigabyte P35C-DS3RIntel P35Memory:2x 1024MB A.DATA DDR2 1066+ CL4Harddisk:WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GBPower Supply:OCZ GameXStream 700WSoftware:Windows XP SP2Drivers:NVIDIA: 175.16ATI: Catalyst 8.5 All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.