14 DAY TRIAL // MSI (Micro-Star International) announced the release of three ATI based GPUs that aim to the top and one of them is a Radeon HD 3870 X2. This graphics card seems to be designed for the ultimate gaming. It doubles the video power of your computer and enables you to experience all the power of HD with 3D processing. With its 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process, this GPU allows you to advance to the next generation HD gaming performance.
The 850MHz Core and 1Gb GDDR3 with a Memory Clock Speed of 1800MHz enable MSI R3870X2 with DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.0 support. The dual ATI R3870 GPUs are able to produce about 1 teraFLOPS of GPU compute power.
Above all, the ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU upgradeability will allow any user to experience even more power and greater levels of performance. With this GPU, you can play the latest "resource eating" games, watch Blu-ray and HD-DVD videos in full 1080p HD, using less CPU and having more energy-saving features.
The R3600 series of graphics cards, the second new MSI release, has 378 million transistor units and is built on the new 55 nanometer manufacturing technology. Its Core Speed reaches 750MHz and features 120 Stream Processing Units. It has 1600MHz Memory Clock Speed, 128-bit GDDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 Memory Interface and can reach 128 textures per pixel.
This GPU comes as well with DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.0 support and features CrossFireX multi-GPU Technology. "The new ATI Radeon HD 3600 family core has 256 bit ring-bus memory control capabilities, with high-speed GDDR3 512MB, and other ultra-realistic graphics memory particles, and efficiency is superior to the same price competitors products", said Vincent Lai, Micro-Star International global Marketing Director. And he has also added that this graphics card has all the cost-effective advantages, as it gives adequate color rendering, multilateral geometry and high-speed image pixels.
The third graphics card launched by MSI is based on ATI Radeon HD 3400 series. The MSI R3400 is just a simple scale-down of the number of stream processors built on the 55nm manufacturing process of the Radeon HD 3600 architecture. You can still play the next generation of HD games with its DirectX 10.1 compatibility and multi-GPU upgradeability provided by ATI Hybrid Graphics or ATI CrossfireX sustained by an Engine Clock Speed of 600MHz and a Memory Clock Speed of 1000MHz.
So far so good, only that ATI did not include any CrossFire support on its latest Catalyst release. And things get worse for Vista 64bit users, as the release notes of Catalyst Software Suite 8.1 state that, on some graphic cards, the enabling of CrossFire may result in Windows Vista failing. On Micro-Star International site, only the display driver included in Catalyst 8.1 (Radeon display driver 8.451) is available for this graphics card. I guess we'll just have to wait for another version of the driver, a full one this time.
