hi
i am receiving the Radeon hd 3870 as a gift from a friend in this week
what will you guys do ?
as i feel its not the best card and i was planning to upgrade to 8800gts 512
and i will not resell this card its a gift
but what will you do guys if you where me
i still use x1650 and i think its still working good with me somehow
would i feel WOW with upgrade?

If its free, just use it and see if it does the job. If not, then upgrade

I'd thank that friend.

This is a gift, you should keep it imo.

3870 are very capable cards and you seem to like your ATI x1650. You might like it.

yes i would thank the guy
but i am asking those who experienced both 8800gts g92 and 3870
is there any noticeable deference
i use of 1024 x 768 in my games

At that resolution, there are few games to day that you wont be able to max out using either card

In that case you might as well decline the gift At least play at 1280x1024 (or 1280x960).

At that resolution, a 3870 is fine. Save yourself some money and use the gift. Also, if you have too powerful a card, you'll be CPU limited at 1024 x 768, so you'd lose a bit of the advantage.

For example, I still have a 17" CRT and am gaming at 1280 x 1024 while I save up for an approximately $500 24" LCD. I'm CPU limited. If I were not saving towards a monitor upgrade, I never would have got the 3870x2. I would have gotten a 3870 instead.

For those with higher resolution monitors, Nordic Hardware reports the 4870 and 4870x2 are due beginning in June. A 4870 will perform as well as a 3870x2 for $299 and a 4870x2 will arrive at $499. IMHO, I don't think this spring is a good time to buy a high end GPU considering what's coming down the pike.

One thing about that 4870, thats comparable with the X2. BUT, without nay of the hangups of CF, plus 5 to 10% IMHO

Well it depends where you live. Where a card is $299 for you it's $499 for us.

EDIT: At launch anyway. The gap closes as time goes on, but we are nearly always $50-100 more than you guys.

That's the great thing about it, if it all pans out. If this were an AMD's CPU, I'd have a wait and see attitude, but ATI really only stumbled with the 2xxx and came back strong with the 3xxx series. So, I only take one grain of salt with any prerelease rumors.

Out of the 3 games I'm playing now, two benefit from the internal Crossfire but LOTR Online does not. My only consolation is people with SLI tell me it doesn't benefit from that either. Way to go Turbine! For $14.95 a month and willing to play for years, we want some multi-GPU support for both ATI and Nvidia cards.

Nordic's saying the R770 XT will arrive in July, not June and that the other cards will be delayed one or two months:

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,7638.html

Well, that kind of gives more leeway for those wanting to upgrade this month. Considering price and availability at launch, if the OP or others get a 3870 now, they'll get 5 or 6 months use out of it before it becomes "obsolete".

It's still that high even with the weak U.S. dollar? Do you live in Australia or the U.K? I think Canadian prices are closer to U.S. for ATI cards, but I haven't been to the Great White North since 1979 (stuck down south in Texas).

I paid $449 for my factory overclocked 3870x2, then it went to $499 a week later, then back to $449 a week after that, then it was "deactivated" at Newegg. I can't tell if MSI ran out of cherry picked GPU's they could overclock or if there were problems. It got a few bad reviews at Newegg, but mine's been good. Benchmark review sites were positive about the card.

When I kvetched in an e-mail to MSI tech support that they included two regular 6 pin PCIe adapters and not an adapter for the 8 pin connector, they e-mailed me back "you can return the card". I just went to AMD's ATI site and found the Antec 650 supported the 3870x2, so I ordered one of those to replace the Antec 550 (I'd thought I'd be okay because the documentation at MSI said a 550 PSU was sufficient).

The fan's quiet at full load (but then again, I have an Antec Nine Hundred case which is really designed for good cooling). Even though it exhausts air out of the case, I'd recommend good cooling otherwise. My 3DMark 06 scores are a bit low, but I "blame" the otherwise decent Athlon X2 4600+ for that. When I go Deneb or Nehalem later it should improve quite a bit. Maybe by then Turbine will have the Crossfire/SLI issues fixed.

People with old CRT's or even lower res LCD's are in a bind. To get the full benefits at the high end, you need a good 22" or 24" LCD monitor, but with the cost of the card plus the monitor, one has to come first. I didn't want to run a 24" LCD on a 7600gs, so I swapped out motherboards and got the 3870x2 first.

Ok so I lied. The HD3870X2 is just over $500 here for the cheapest one.