Originally Posted by huniper

Does anyone have any water cooled clocks yet with this new bios?

Originally Posted by 003

Convincing people in advance is hard. On the 20th, it won't be.

Every single review of the HD3870 that includes the 2900 for testing used the cat 7.10 drivers on the 2900 and the beta 7.11 cats on the 3870.

The 3870 is quite literally, a die shrink of the R600 including UVD+ and an inferior 256-bit memory controller and 512-bit internal ring bus. What it does have though, is a higher core clock speed than the XT (775 vs 743) and a higher memory clock, but in the end (with regards to memory alone) the memory bandwidth is what matters and in the case of the 3870, a 256-bit memory bus with higher clocked memory is not enough to keep up with the 512-bit memory and 1024-bit internal ring bus on the 2900Pro/XT.

The memory bandwidth on a stock HD3870 is 72GB/s. The memory bandwidth on a stock XT is 105GB/s. The memory bandwidth on my 2900Pro with the memory @ 1035MHz is 125GB/s. The canadian website that overclocked the 3870 to 860MHz core and 2.7xGHz mem did not post a screenshot of GPU-Z. Even if they did I seriously doubt the bandwidth would have increased so drastically that it would surpass 125GB/s. The 256-bit memory bus and 512-bit internal ring bus are what kills the memory on the 3870. If ATI had used 512-bit gddr4 memory with a 1024-bit internal ring bus, the 2900 series would not have stood a chance against the 3870 and nvidia would be sweating a lot more than they are now. Unfortunately, they didn't.

Also it is important to know that the 2900Pro and the 2900XT are exactly the same card, they just have different bios'. The pro has tighter timings on the memory and when at the same core speed as the XT, it will beat the XT even with lower memory clocks, and this is consistantly the case. This is why it is better to use a volt modded pro bios rather than the volt modded XT bios, even when the XT bios will technically allow for higher memory clocks.

Moving on to the core.... it's pretty much the same as the R600, except a die shrink and the addition of UVD+ support. It also seems that right now, the 3870 refuses to budge an inch over 860mhz, which is very bad because a volt modded pro will easily hit 880MHz without breaking a sweat, possibly 900MHz or over, and that would be without question if you're on water cooling. I am on very good air and I know there are at least two people on XS to get 900 and 920mhz with volt mods on good air (and afaik, few others have tried, and the ones that have did not volt mod).

Hope this satisfies you...

Originally Posted by QuickSkillz

Nah thats ok, I could care less about 3dmark06 just because it is rigged. I wanted to see some real world fps results.