It is a bit old now the HD -3000 card now, being the card that propelled the ATI brand to go dual and beat the 9-series from its DX10 graphics’ card domination, and gave also the life of the new HD4000 and the basis of the new 4870X2 card with the same RV770 chipset configuration form the single card 4870.
But the Jetway company is a bit slow or just being hit hard by the financial crisis that they cannot have the more advance of dual card graphics from ATI or even the NVIDIA corporation. But the only thing that makes this not a pretty bad card is just availability of the thing is much better than any card, but now being that slow of a card and also having the previous problem of having a bug in some of the ATI catalyst drivers, but can be resolved by monthly driver updates.
But the Jetway 4870X2 card is not a problem to look at and also the specs are all the same with all of the 3870X2 cards, with 775MHz in the core frequency of each of the cores and also 900MHx of each of the clock cycle of the card with 2000MHz effective frequency memory bandwidth but still having only 1GB of video memory buffer. The card in the physical form is the same of the form factors being 26cm in length and also the size of about two standard PCI slot size so also the cooling fan has a single fans placed in the back of the card and blows all of the heat in the back of the card but having a problem to push effectively the heat produced in the dual GPU’s and also some help of the hybrid copper and also aluminium fins and cooler blocks. So it can be the same as the reference 4870X2 but without the problem of having a crash stress in standard settings because of the heat produced; of about 90 degrees in the worst case scenario, a lossy prepared case and also limited or no air circulation.
The performance gauge of the old 3870X2 card form Jetway is lower than usual for a 6 month old graphics card, only going as much as 30fps in Crysis game in high detail with the DX10 enabled and also AAF settings are turned on. But while you can play a bit more in the far cry 2 game with some of the settings in high, but no really going much higher from 50fps.
So, the jetway have made a good card out of a old card, but the 3870X2 was never going to be a good thing now because of the arrival of the 4870X2 and the newer GTX 295 which now beats the competition, while we should say going out of the old in with the new, when you have this card lying around, you can get another one and do quad crossfire to boost up some scores.
