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And the Winner Is...
B
efore we get to our conclusion, we have to bring up the matter
of Vista performance. We’ve been running these benchmarks
under both Vista and XP for quite some time without any problems.
After we installed Vista Service Pack 1, however, our Crysis bench-
mark crashed on our Nvidia test bench in SLI mode, and Unreal
Tournament 3 crashed on our AMD system in CrossFire mode.
Aside from that, this wasn’t much of a contest: The Radeon HD
3870 is the far superior videocard when it comes to home-theater
applications—but you don’t need a GPU this powerful for watchingmovies. Any of the lesser GPUs in AMD’s Radeon HD 3000 line would
be just as good for that purpose—buy one that can be cooled passively
and avoid the noise a fan will produce.
The GeForce 8800 GTS delivers far superior gaming perfor-
mance in both single- and dual-GPU modes, and it can also handle
HD-video decoding. Yes, cards based on this GPU are considerably
more expensive than those built around AMD’s offering, but the
increased performance fully justifies the higher price tag.ROUND 4
OVERALL PRICE/PERFORMANCE RATIO
As we went to press, the Radeon HD 3870 was selling for
$75 less than the GeForce 8800 GTS—that’s a 30 percent
difference. But the gulf between the competitors’ gam-
ing performance—and games are the primary reason
you’d be considering either of these cards—is even
wider. In single-card mode, the 8800 GTS was nearly 60
percent faster than the Radeon when playing Crysis, and
it was 72 percent faster in dual-card mode. The Radeon
HD 3870 is cheap, but the GeForce 8800 GTS completely
justifi es its price premium.
Winner: GeForce 8800 GTSRADEON HD 3870
HIS H387F512N
$175, http://www.hisdigital.comBest scores in single- and dual-GPU mode are bolded. AMD-based cards are tested with an Intel D975BX2 motherboard; Nvidia-based cards are tested with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard. Intel 2.93GHz Core 2
Extreme X6800 CPU and 2GB of Corsair DDR RAM used in both scenarios. Benchmarks performed at 1920x1200 resolution on ViewSonic VP2330wb monitors.BENCHMARKS(^) HIS Radeon Leadtek GeForce (^) HIS Radeon GeForceLeadtek
HD 3870 8800 GTS HD 3870 8800 GTS
(single) (single) (dual) (dual)
WINDOWS XP
3DMark06 Game 1 (fps) 23.4 29.2 38.2 52.
3DMark06 Game 2 (fps) 20.9 22.3 29.1 40.
Crysis (DX9) (fps) 11.8 19.6 11.8 27.
Unreal Tournament 3 (fps) 60.9 78.9 83.7 113.
WINDOWS VISTA
3DMark06 Game 1 (fps) 22.8 27.6 42.1 53.
3DMark06 Game 2 (fps) 20.6 21.5 30.6 41.
Crysis (DX10) (fps) 10.5 19.5 16.5 WNR
Unreal Tournament 3 (fps) 56.3 70.4 WNR 75.