SAPPHIRE Toxic Radeon HD 3870 DirectX 10.1 100225TXSR 512MB 256-Bit GDDR4 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

Pros: I bought two cards for Crossfire. They were packaged well and complete with extra adapters. They seem to run cool in my box without add-on cooling equipment, even in running 3DMark06 and the Vista PCMark Advantage64 testing software. Getting a 13,646 3dMark06 score with zero adjusting and a 4,690 PCMark Vantage 64 score. Not sure if that's good or not, but Team Fortress 2 looks great!

Cons: Download the latest Catalyst Control Panel application and video drivers. I had a hard time getting the second card recognized and had to re-install drivers, do a driver clean-up in Safe Mode and install a clean Catalyst set and cards individually. The directions to Crossfire the cards weren't helpful but I found good directions in techpowerup forum.

Overall Review: Intel 6600 quad CPU, Gigabyte GA-38T-Dq6 motherboard, 4 GB RAM Kingston 2x1GB DDR3 1333, two Radeon Sapphire Toxic 3870 512MB DDR4 Ram video cards in Crossfire, Western Digital 500GB SATA 3.0 HD in Raid 0, Samsung SH-203N SATA DVD burner, Edimax EW-7128G wireless LAN, Logitech X-530 70-watt sound system, Logitech G-11 gaming keyboard, Samsung 226BW 22" LCD monitor, running on MS Vista 64-bit OS.

Pros: See 1st review (D15AV0W3D's)

Cons: See 1st review (D15AV0W3D's)

Overall Review: Update on free Black Box game included: after doing some searching, and emails back and forth w/ Sapphire (tech@althonmicro.com), I discovered that the link they had was wrong (www.steamgames.com/activateati). The correct address, in case anyone else gets a box missing the voucher, is: http://www.steampowered.com/activateATI/ This gets you a free copy of Half Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Day of Defeat: Source, all from Valve. If yours comes missing the voucher like mine did, email Sapphire for a product key, and use the link above, then voila-- 4 games you can play on your Steam acct. for free! If you're reading this and find it informative, please mark "helpful" so others having this issue will find it. Thanks!

Pros: Factory overclock, has really low temp even on full load. single slot cooling.not an electricity eater.crushes crysis.

Cons: NONe. make sure our familiar with setting up crossfire, and overclocking parameters.got mine oc to 900mhz and 1300mhz mem speed.40 c on full load

Overall Review: no need to worry about cooling. my system (phenom 9600, m3a3-a2 deluxe wifi asus 790fx mobo, kingston hyper x ddr2 1066 mem 4 gig. 2x 3870 toxic overlocked and in crossfire, on a 690psu.

Pros: Comes packaged with hundresds of dollars worth of software/hardware, includes HDMI cable, Vapor-X technology cools like no other, comes "overclocked" out of the box to 800/1152, overclocks OVER that like madness (875/1277), frames could not be any better (well, maybe jsut a little: Crysis Custom settings 2xAA 30ish frames@1360), SINGLE SLOT! Need I really say more?

Cons: Very steep price, considering that the 3000 family just dropped down in price considerably, this might not be the most sensible purchase you'll ever make.

Overall Review: This card does not dissapoint, regardless of the price. Considering how this card is in the top 5 tier of cards out there, and the low low and I mean LOW heat dissipation (50C on Crysis), this is completely worth the extra money. Not to mention Cyberlink DVD suite, PowerDVD AND 3DMark all included in the box. While it's true my case is well ventilated, if you're looking for extreme performance in video and have the money to spend, I would recommend spending the extra cash for this card in particular - especially if you are planning for 3 or more card setups.

Pros: Excellent price/performance/cooling/bundle, low power consumption. (I am able to run 2 in Crossfire on a 700w power supply.) Single slot doesn't suffocate in Crossfire, remarkably cool. I am able to run Crysis @ 1680x1050(no AA, no AF), very high in XP(yes, I had to hack the cfg files to do it) and I average 22-32 FPS. Runs everything else I have (Orange Box, B&W, Oblivion) maxed (8x AA, 16x AF) and I average ~60fps w/VSync on. My monitor's refesh rate is actually a bottleneck at this point.

Cons: Single slot cooling means all the heat goes to the front of the case, but if you set up a fan in the front to suck the hot air out, you should be fine. Don't buy it now, the Radeon HD 4870's are due to come out June/July of this year, so wait and get them, or get this once the price goes even lower after the new cards come out.

Overall Review: If you want the most performance available, then get Nvidia. Their high-end/flagship cards trump this one, but their price to performance ratio is lower and they use more power. If you want the most performance available for less than 200$, this card is the way to go, just wait for the price to drop even further once the 4870 comes out.

Pros: It's a one slot card, so unless you have a really tiny mother board or case, it'll fit in perfectly. I have an older socket 720 Intel mother board from about three years ago, so I was worried about computability issues. I got the card because I am updating my mobo and processor eventually anyway and figured why not try it? I plugged it in and got a display no problem. It easily overclocked to 875 mhz core and 1322 mhz memory clock speeds while keeping a cool 55 C temp on full load. The cooling system on this thing is insane - and quiet too.

Cons: Drivers were a pain in the neck. The driver cd that shipped with my card was faulty (i.e. it did not run at all). I installed the most up to date catalyst drivers off of the AMD website instead - which I planned on doing anyway. Upon restart, however, my computer continued to tell me that there was new hardware - an unknown pci device. Some research told me that it wasn't the GPU that was coming up as new hardware (the card came up fine in the hardware manager) it was the HD audio bus that is on the thing. The error prevented my catalyst control center from starting up. So I downloaded hotfix kb888111, which is the hotfix for HD audio on windows xp. The unknown pci device then came up as a hd audio bus, which I subsequently disabled - though I could just as easily have installed drivers for it if I wanted to use it.

Overall Review: If you have the same sort of issue I had, make sure you're running windows xp sp2 to install the hotfix, because apparently it won't install right under sp3. Just uninstall sp3 and revert to sp2 to install the hotfix, then you can go back to sp3 with no issues.

Pros: Purchased 2 of these cards. I own over 100 PC video games, of which over 97% of them would require vertical sync with just one of these cards. In other words, Crossfire is useful for only 5 of them. Of course, I play games @ 1280 x 1024 on a 17in CRT. With the Cooler Master CosmosS 1100 case I recently purchased, I cannot differentiate the toxic coolers on both cards from my Zalman 9700 or the three other fans in the case. I'm very pleased with this, as I was concerned they would be noisey. I went from an Athlon XP 2400 + Radeon X1600 Pro to a a Core 2 Duo E8400 + 2 x Radeon 3870. Its not so much that the games look better, but the game play is smooth as silk. My level of skill in UT2004 has skyrocketed in both instant action and online.

Cons: The drivers. I have issues with older games with both 8.3 and 8.4. Some older games won't display above 1280 x 768, while other games will BSOD, this is with Crossfire disabled. However, I don't ever remember a prior driver that didn't crash on occasion with at least a couple of my games, and I've owned a number of ATI cards since the 8500.

Overall Review: A word about Crysis. I played Far Cry @ max settings @ 1280 x 1024 and then I played Crysis @ medium settings @ 1024 x 768. Crysis blows Far Cry out the water. I don't understand people. This game looks spectacular even at medium settings at 1024 x 768, let alone on high at 1280 x 1024. Plus, at those settings, I get excellent frame rates and no stuttering or hitching.

Pros: I purchased three of these (two for my new build, YA CROSSFIRE, and 1 for the wifes) and they run great. Able to run any game I throw at it, even Crysis on High settings @ 1280 x 1024 and on a few of the levels at Very High. Overclocks well too. I have been able to get mine too 875/1297 easily (need to crank up the fans though).

Cons: Should have gotten two more for CorssfireX in my system.