Those who are eagerly counting down until the official launch of the Radeon HD 3870 X2 have surely been disappointed with the last piece of news that claimed the chip manufacturer has delayed the product until January 28, as it was initially scheduled.

Apart from the fact that you will have to wait to see the monster unveiled, one thing is for sure: the graphics card is alive and kicking; moreover, it was spotted on the retailers' shelves in China. The first manufacturer to have released the cards is HIS, with their own model of Radeon HD 3870 X2 (HIS HD3870X2 1GB), clocked at 825MHz and 1000MHz for the GPUs and the memory, respectively.

It comes with 1 GB of GDDR3 memory on board and features a price tag of around $550. That's a real bargain, given the fact that the announced price for the same model was $615. The card is as big as we have seen back during the Consumer Electronics Show, and is fully covered in the metal heatsink assembly.

The cooling system has triggered the first speculations about the card being delayed, as it seems to lack efficiency in ventilating both GPUs. When the air reaches the second GPU, it is already hot, as a result of "visiting" the first GPU on the board, so the second may work improperly or even can get itself fried.

OCWorkbench has managed to grab a piece and the 3DMark 06 benchmark results are situated at 9573 points for a test run at an impressive resolution of 2560x1600. The testbed was not special at all, since it was powered by an 'obsolete' Core 2 Duo clocked at 2.4GHz.

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 beats the upcoming Nvidia dual-GPU video card in all the existing games, except for the Crysis, where Nvidia's prodigal card beats the crap out of AMD/ATI.