Two Radeon 3870 X2s working in pair. Note the longer Crossfire connector

AMD'S ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 marks first real dual-GPU supported and manufactured by AMD. As you can see in a pictures, the boards are connected via single bridge. The reason for first single-bridge appearance in ATI cards (HD2600 X2X has two bridges, just like regular parts) is the fact that one bridge is wired through the PCB and links the two GPUs locally, so "black magic" was not used in order to connect two the GPUs. Just logic and available resources.� Beneath the cooler there are two chips. Each has its own 512MB of memory. But even with this board producing a decent amount of heat, this cooler does not use any visible heatpipes. It is just a longer version of the concept we saw with the 2900XT from the outside, but from the inside, there is nothing but copper fins. This board will consume give or take equal power as a single 2900XT, and ATI opted to use one six-pin and one eight-pin PEG connector. With the 8-pin connector being specc'ed as a PCIe Gen2 requirement, it'so wonder that both AMD and Nvidia will use this connector in the future.

When the board debuts (current target is February) with higher clocked Phenoms (B3 rev), getting two of these cards will set you back anywhere between 800 and 1000 US Dollars or Euro, meaning buyers of four Radeon HD 3850s today will not lose their value when these two pop along.

In other news, check out this "how-to" video of Sami Maekinen using the AMD OverDrive utility. He walks through the steps of overclocking the upcoming Spider Platform, based on AMD Phenom quad-core processors, ATI Radeon HD3800 Series and the AMD 7-Series chipset: