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Impressions

The most noteworthy thing about the VisionTek Radeon HD 3870 X2 is the card's far-from-reference board design cooler. While the reference HD3870X2's have a solid bank of aluminum fins paired to a single fan for their cooling, the VisionTek HD3870X2 OC instead sports a cooler design that is reminiscent of the popular Thermaltake DuOrb cooler. The cooler looks like it should be easily capable of supporting some high clocks.

VisionTek HD3870X2 OC, Asus EAH3870X2

Let's describe the cooler from the GPU up: first, we have thermal tape fusing the GPU to a copper plate. This copper plate has about one hundred fins perpendicularly arranged on it; four circular heat pipes are connected the copper core above the GPU's, and these in turn have another ray of fins coming from them. A pair of nine-vane high-speed fans sit atop both copper cores, trying their best to keep the OC from baking the goods.

While testing will bear out how effective this cooler is, it certainly looks effective  -- it appears to be off the same quality of cooler that you could conceivably buy in a store for $30 dollars or more and  have to install yourself. Unfortunately, when comes to the acoustic footprint, I found that the fans of this cooler create somewhat of a high-pitch whir when engaged in full operation. While other louder fans from other coolers I have heard tend to create more a lower, thrumming sound (lets call it a 'regular' fan sound) this cooler produces a sort of high frequency buzz. The sound did not bother me all that much, but it was there and is something that should be mentioned.

One other benefit of this cooler is its somewhat smaller size in comparison to a standard cooler found on a HD3870X2. This smaller size makes the VisionTek HD3870X2 card a better choice for someone who plans a CrossFireX setup. With the Asus EAH3870X2 or the reference design, on many motherboards multiple cards would be sandwiched so close together it would make proper air-flow problematic. However if the VisionTek HD3870X2 was paired with another HD3870X2 (or HD3870), air-flow should be fine -- most especially if you have multiple exhaust fans in your case.

Width comparison: VisionTek HD3870X2 OC, Asus EAH3870X2, Gigabyte HD3870

Not only the cooler is of high-quality in this video card -- the PCB and circuit arrangement is also non-reference. The VisionTek HD3870X2 OC is actually shorter than the reference HD3870X2, as you can see in the pictures below. Honestly the back of the card is just damn good-looking, if you have you have fetish for hardware like me -- whoever designed the layout of the printed circuit board did an excellent job. In pratical terms, the VisionTek being about 1.25" - 1.5" shorter than the regular HD3870X2, may make it a better choice for those with smaller cases or space constraints. The apparent craftsmanship, high-quality transistors and ferrite cores used in the VisionTek HD3870X2 OC lead me to have high hopes for the gaming performance levels that will be reached by this card.

Specifications 

This video card has 4 DVI out's, and one S-Video out, so you will never have any troubles hooking up multiple displays if you feel so inclined.

Like all of the current 3000 series of ATI cards, the HD3870X2 has the Unified Video Decoding and Avivo video engine, which work together to produce high quality, 1080p HD output. The HDCP support and HDMI-out 5.1 audio allow for playing HD DVD and Blu-ray video in all their full digital glory without taxing your CPU all that much at all.

As well, this card supports DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, PCI 2.0,  and is very much able to be connected with up to three more video cards in a multi-GPU CrossFireX setup. Remember that with CrossFire X you can get the HD3870X2 going with any other 3000 series ATI card, but you'll be doing the HD3870X2 a disservice by running in with anything less than a HD3850 card.

The standard clocks for the HD3870X2 are 825 for the core clock, and 1800 for the 1GB of GDDR3. The VisionTek has a modest OC of 840 for the clock, and 1920 for the memory.

 

One final thing to keep in: just because this is a dual-GPU video card doesn't mean it'll work on every motherboard. You're going to want a CrossFire compatible motherboard. The AMD 790FX, AMD70-X, Intel 975X, P965, P35 and X38 chipsets all should not have any trouble with this card .