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Impressions

The Asus EAH3850 X2 1GB is a behemoth card, only smaller in size than the monster 9800GX2.

Asus went with the same cooler as they used with their EAH3870X2 video card. In fact, the EAH3870X2 and EAH3870X2 appear virtually identical -- the only way of telling them apart is that the EAH3850X2 has two DVI ports, where as the EAH3870X2 has four.

As with my review of the EAH3870X2, I believe this Asus cooler is fairly effective. There are two parts to the cooling: the heatsink, and a pair of fans. For the heatsink, we have two long copper plates that are attached to both GPUs and the memory as well. From these copper plates, heat pipes attach themselves to two arrays of aluminum fins. These fins are cooled by two seperate fans (which is fairly uncommon as video card coolers go.) While generally I prefer coolers that push hot air out of the rear bracket (and out of the rear of your case), having a pair of fans (over only one) mitigates this problem.

Today's review, the Asus EAH3850X2 on the left, and NVIDIA's current big-guns dual-GPU card, the XFX 9800GX2, on the right.

All in all, a good cooler, which makes overclocking look promising -- except for one problem after the card's initial installation: a annoying level of noise. Initially, this is one of the louder cooling options I've heard in regular operation. The fan seemed to be running at %100 all the time -- this issue was not found with the EAH3870X2, so it was surprising. But, fortunately  this problem was solved when I installed SmartDoctor, which is part of the software that accompanies the EAH3850 X2. On its own SmartDoctor is top-notch overclocking and fan control program made by Asus for Asus cards -- but in most cases, I'd only recommend its installation if you are interested in overclocking; however this time around, installing SmartDoctor is essential (unless, perhaps, you are deaf or have somesuch similar severe ailment.) After the program's installation, during regular operation the EAH3850X2 will generate an acceptable amount of noise -- only when you are really pushing it to the limits does it get noisy, after SmartDoctor is installed.

There was one other odd problem I had with the EAH3850X2, and for lack of better place to include it, I'll relate it here. The EAH3850X2 has two DVI ports, labeled '1' and '2', in addition to a HDTV output. Port 1 is yellow, and allows for output to HDMI with an included adapter.  So it seemed reasonable enough to plug my monitor into the port 1, as I would imagine most people would. However, strange thing was, my maximum resolution was limited to 1600x1200, in both games and Vista. It took me a while to figure out the problem -- once I had my monitor plugged into port 2, the maximum possible resolution went back to 2048x1536. This is a sort of odd quirk that may cause people trouble so I thought I'd point it out. Perhaps this will be remedied with future Catalyst drivers. In my current Catalyst control centre, the options to control the maximum display resolution for both ports was shaded out.   

The EAH3850X2 also has some LED's on it: three in the center on the back of the card, and another one near the PCIE power connectors.  They are only single color LEDs, but nonetheless, they are a nice little touch to the appearance of the card.

Sometimes you can spell VRAM with a 'S': the EAH3850X2 has a full, tasty gigabyte of GDDR3 memory.

Specifications

Unfortunately, our software was not reading the memory bandwidth and texture fillrate correctly -- but this will be added very soon.

In almost every respect, the EAH3850X2 is just what'd you'd expect: it is very much just two HD3850 GPUs that have been fused together on the same board, working together for greater gaming glory through a hardwired CrossFire bridge. 

As per the HD 3000 series standard, the EAH3850 has a Unified Video Decoder engine for improved HD and Blu-Ray DVD playback, DirectX 10.1 and pixel shader 4.0 support, and is HDCP capable.

Size comparison: EAH3850X2 compared to the Asus HD3870 T.O.P.

Check out those heat pipes! Those bode well for all the benchmarks to come...

Unified Video Decoder and ATI Avivo HD video. Comes with TV-Out and dual DVI connectors. DirectX 10.1 API and pixel shader 4.0 technology support. CrossFire and HDCP capable.