AMD 3870 X2 priced at 399, NVIDIA 9800GX2 at 449, both with dual GPU cores

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AMD will launch it's first Dual GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 on 23 Jan 2008. It's competitor, NVIDIA plans to launch a GeForce 9800GX2 and it is scheduled on 14 Feb 2008.

The two cards are quite similar in technology. Both binds two existing high end GPUs using either SLI or CrossFire technology. The GeForce 9800GX2 uses 2 x G92 GPUs with 256 stream processors each. It uses a dual layer PCB design. With the BR05 chipset, 2 x G92 can share a common PCI express slot. It's imperformance would be 1.3 to 1.5x of the 8800 Ultra.

The interesting fact of this product is that, with 2 pieces of GeForce 9800GX2, Quad SLI can be achieved through SLI.

As usual, market response to such high end cards are lukewarm. Thus, not many manufacturers will be interested in spending time to design their own. We should be seeing reference designs on the market again probably from sticker brands from both camps. The quantities will also be quite limited.

The 3870X2 supporst DX10.1 while the GeForce 9800X2 based on G92 will only support DX10.