Radeon HD 3870 X2 is the best performing card AMD has to offer and with two RV670 graphics circuits working together there is certainly potential for more than your average graphics card. It might seem that using two chips would cripple the overclocking potential, and sure … it has an impact, but if you cool it sufficiently there is no reason to worry. There are already several water blocks and they’ve proven to work well.
Aussie overclocker T_M shows that it’s more than feasible to cool Radeon HD 3870 X2 with exotic cooling. He designed a mounting bracket which let him use his two LN² pots with his new 3870X2 graphics card. With the pots fitted to the card and the liquid nitrogen pouring into the pots he managed to push the frequencies from the stock 825/900MHz to 1066/1062MHz.
Pretty impressive as the two cores have to work at the same frequency. Together with an adequately cooled Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor operating at 5350MHz, T_M scored 26,073 points in 3DMark06. Not an entirely optimized system, and with more GPU and CPU power he might be able to come close to Shamino’s 28,313 points with two Radeon HD 3870 in CrossFire. Shamino had to do some serious hardware mods to get his GPUs up to 1200MHz though, but there are similar mods for the 3870X2.
Radeon HD 3870 X2 is starting to really shine and right now we’re wondering what four GPUs working together can do, especially as you can throw LN² at them. The only problem is keeping track of five different temperatures at the same time. Three can be a pain if you’re working solo, keeping track of five on your own is just stupid. Get a friend, brother, sister, hamster, etc. to keep track of one card, while you deal with the other card and the CPU, and you should be fine.
More on T_M’s escapades can be found over at XtremeSystems.org.
