Radeon HD 3870 X2 Goes on Sale

With two of AMD's hottest processors under the hood on one board, the HD 3870 X2 supposedly doubles the performance of AMD's last high-end board.

Having just expanded the budget end of its Radeon line on Thursday, AMD turned its attention back to the bleeding edge on Monday with the release of its new flagship GPU, the Radeon HD 3870 X2. The company claims it is the first graphics processor to break the teraflop processing level of one trillion floating point calculations a second, thanks to a dual-processor design.

By linking two 55nm chips on a single board with CrossFire technology (the same standard that allows users to put two or more Radeon boards in one system), AMD has produced a GPU that it says actually doubles the performance of the old last flagship model, the HD 3870, in certain benchmarks. Despite the increased horsepower, AMD also claims the card should not be significantly louder, which has become a major issue among high-end graphics cards.

Standard features from other models in the Radeon line, including DirectX 10.1 support and an on-board HD-DVD decoder have also been carried over to the HD 3870 X2.

Boards based on the Radeon HD 3870 should is available immediately with retail prices around $449. Cards from Sapphire, Diamond, VisionTek, HIS, PowerColor and Asus have already been spotted for sale.