Michael Brown Asus EAH 3870

AMD has pulled a rabbit out of its hat by transforming the near-debacle that was the R600 architecture into a serious mainstream contender: The Radeon HD 3870.

The new GPU delivers several important features left out of AMD’s previous best effort: the Radeon HD 2900 XT. The most important of these is the inclusion of AMD’s Unified Video Decoder, which offloads all high-definition video decoding chores from the host CPU. The new part supports HDCP on both DVI links, too, so Blu-ray and HD DVD movies can be displayed at the native resolution of a 30-inch panel. There’s also support for new technologies such as PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10.1, and Shader Model 4.1, although it remains to be seen how important these features will be in the near future. (Nvidia’s new 8800 GT is also PCI Express 2.0 compliant, but it doesn’t support DirectX 10.1.)

Asus’s EAH3870 is the first retail board we’ve examined that uses the 3870 part, and we’re impressed: It’s been a while since we’ve been able to laud anything other than an Nvidia-based videocard with a Kick Ass award. This card is not only powerful, it’s also affordably priced at $260 (and includes the first-rate game Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts).

AMD promises we’ll see other cards based on this GPU selling for $220, but those will likely come with reference-design clocks. In this case, Asus bumped the 3870’s core clock speed to 851MHz and the card’s 512MB of GDDR4 memory to 1.143GHz (from AMD’s reference-design speeds of 775MHz and 1.125GHz, respectively). Asus had just begun shipping these cards and was able to provide us with only one, so check MaximumPC.com for an updated review with CrossFire numbers.

Great job, AMD! Now get back into the lab and build a new GPU that can compete at the high end of the market.

Consumers finally have a real choice in GPUs. The Radeon HD 3870 at the heart of Asus’s EAH3870 is a genuine contender.

Asus EAH 3870
www.asus.com

Aces

Unified Video Decoder; PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10.1, and Shader Model 4.1support; affordable. AMD's first card in a while that can compete with Nvidia.

Deuces

Not as fast as the 8800 GT in DirectX 9.

Windows XP (DirectX 9)
	EVGA E-GeForce 8800 GT SSC	ASUS EAH3870 (Radeon HD 3870)
3DMark06 Game 1 (FPS)	30.0	24.6
3DMark06 Game 2 (FPS)	22.9	21.3
World in Conflict (FPS)	32.0	22.0
Lost Planet (FPS)	34.3	23.4

Windows Vista (DirectX 10)
	EVGA E-GeForce 8800 GT SSC	ASUS EAH3870 (Radeon HD 3870)
3DMark06 Game 1 (FPS)	28.0	24.0
3DMark06 Game 2 (FPS)	22.3	21.3
World in Conflict (FPS)	20.0	23.0
Lost Planet (FPS)	22.0	24.2
Best single-GPU score bolded. AMD-based cards tested with an Intel D975BX2 motherboard; Nvidia-based cards tested with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard. Intel 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPUs and 2GB of Corsair DDR RAM used in both scenarios. Benchmarks performed at 1920x1200 resolution on ViewSonic VP2330wb monitors.

Crysis

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way up front. On a properly configured Vista machine with DirectX 10 hardware, Crysis is the best-looking game we've ever played. Its jungle environments are lush and realistic, with plenty of wide-open areas and just a handful of loading screens in the entire game. This incredible level of graphical detail is what PC gaming is all about.

Stealth tactics make sense when you’re on foot, but when you’re driving a 60-ton tank, you need not be subtle.

Screenshots don't do this game justice. Seeing Crysis in action will take your breath away. The perfectly rendered jungle scenes, gorgeous beaches, and water that looks better than the real thing set a new high mark for PC graphics and far surpass what we expected from a first-gen DirectX 10 title. Even more surprising, when we tested the game on DirectX 9 hardware, it still looked stunning—although we missed the fancy depth-of-field effect that is used fairly liberally on DX10 systems.

As for the game, it's carved straight from the generic first-person shooter playbook. There are bad guys (North Koreans, this go around), who are doing something they shouldn't (unearthing an alien artifact), and a hero (you) with powers (via a supersuit that lets you jump higher, run faster, and be invisible) that make you uniquely capable of accomplishing a challenging goal (saving the world). It’s all very predictable. The game mechanics aren’t particularly innovative either—we've done all this before.

That's not to say Crysis isn’t a fun, well-polished game—it definitely is. It's just not revolutionary from a gameplay perspective. The game’s by-the-book weapons include pistols, a shotgun, a rifle or two, and a submachine gun, which you customize with different add-ons—scopes, silencers, grenade launchers, and a few others. While this level of customization could have added some needed depth, you generally end up choosing between the silencer and grenade launcher, depending on the number of baddies you want to take out. Because you'll pick up all of the weapons and add-ons within the first hour or two of the game and you gain absolutely no new suit capabilities beyond those you start with (armor, superspeed, cloaking, and superstrength), character development feels extremely stunted.

Where Crysis really excels is in actual combat, especially at the higher difficulty settings. While the AI seems mildly stunted at the default difficulty, at more challenging settings it’s more realistic without seeming prescient. The brilliant AI, combined with the open maps, which let you scout an encounter unseen and then approach from the best possible side to crush the enemy, is the game's saving grace.

In Crysis, merely shooting a bad guy isn’t the only way to kill him. You can literally blow his house down.

On easy, Crysis is a forgettable run’ n’ gun shooter, which you'll finish in a few short hours. When you crank the game up to the highest difficulty setting, it's a much more tactical experience. You must silently dispatch your enemies while evading detection or you’ll be killed. To up the immersion factor, the game also forces you to use iron sights and the Korean baddies actually speak Korean. You won't know whether they're talking about the weather or one just saw you skulking through the undergrowth.

Crysis is undoubtedly the type of game that will make your console-playing buddies take note, but compared to other recent shooters, there's virtually no character development. Luckily, the combat is outstanding, more than making up for the game's minor failings.

Crysis sets a whole new level for visual quality in games with its unbelievable graphics.

In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Introduces New System Benchmarks

It’s been a long time since the zero-point system and benchmarks we use to test PCs and other components have been updated, and it shows. The enthusiast world has switched from AMD to Intel and a new OS is upon us.

To select our new hardware and benchmarks, a committee of editors sat around a box of doughnuts and debated the direction of performance computing. We discussed the typical tasks power users perform and how we could make our benchmarks pertain to those needs. Then, we discussed what PC configuration to use to test all new hardware in the coming year. Our zero-point rigs represent the basic level of hardware we expect a power user to have six months from now. These machines serve not only as a reference point for readers of our system reviews but also as test beds for almost all the hardware and software we review.

Generally, we update our zero-point config and all our benchmarks every 12 to 18 months, but this time, we’re breaking from convention. We’re sticking with old gaming benchmarks for the time being. Why? With high-profile titles like Crysis on the cusp of release, we decided to continue running Quake 4 and FEAR benchmarks until newer, more graphically intensive DirectX 10 titles are available. At that time we’ll fold those tests into our benchmark suite.

The Hardware

Although considered high end by most, our zero-point system really stacks up as a midrange machine

CPU

When we spec’d our new test machines, we decided quad core was a must-have feature. We would have considered both AMD and Intel, but as you know, AMD is a no-show in the consumer quad-core game. We normally reach for the top-tier CPU, but this year, we selected a CPU that most enthusiasts on a budget would buy, not what we all want. Intel’s fast, new QX9650 was out of our price range, so the company’s Core 2 Quad Q6700 got the job. At $500, it’s pricey but not a wallet breaker. For our zero-point, we’ll run it at its stock 2.66GHz clock even though we know it’ll run at 2.93GHz all day without breaking a sweat.

Motherboard

EVGA’s nForce 680i SLI board marks the fourth Nvidia-based chipset that we’ve adopted for our zero-point systems.

EVGA’s 680i SLI will soon be supplanted by Nvidia’s follow-up to the chipset, but we’ve chosen it for its affordability and proven ability as a workhorse. Plus, BIOS updates from Nvidia have been timely and the chipset supports SLI. Maximum PC historians will note that the 680i SLI is the fourth generation of nForce chipsets we’ve adopted since we stopped being an Intel-only chipset shop.

Videocards

A pair of EVGA 8800 GTX boards gives our machine potent gaming capability at all resolutions.

The best-performing card right now is EVGA’s GeForce 8800 Ultra, which sells for more than $700, making SLI cost prohibitive. That’s why our machine uses a pair of EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX warhorses. The duo gives us smooth performance at just about any resolution you’d play games at.

Memory

8GB? 4GB? Nah. Within the limitations of a 32-bit OS, the sweet spot for system RAM is sadly still 2GB. To meet our zero-point system’s needs, we reached for 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 Dominator 8500C5D modules. The modules are rated to run at 1,066MHz, which will be useful when an individual machine has to be overclocked to test cooling gear.

Hard Drives

Because we constantly wipe our test beds with a clean hard disk image, we’re eschewing a RAID setup (disk imagers work inconsistently with RAID). We didn’t want to totally give up on performance, though, so our main boot drive is a single 10,000rpm 150GB Western Digital Raptor drive. A supplemental 7,200rpm 500GB WD Caviar pulls bulk-storage duties for holding drivers, benchmarks, and image files.

Optical Drives

Burning Blu-ray and HD DVD discs isn’t critical for every editor, but viewing high-resolution movies is an important part of testing many products. With that in mind, we reached for LG’s GGC-H20L drive, which reads both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs and gives us DVD and CD burning capability. The drive has a SATA interface and will likely mark the end of PATA in our Lab.

Soundcard

As good as the EVGA 680i SLI boards are, they still use Realtek’s onboard audio, with its fake-ass EAX support. To fill the void, Creative Labs’s X-Fi XtremeGamer gives us hardware audio support in XP (and the Vista drivers almost work too!).

Power Supply

We’ve long used PC Power and Cooling’s PSUs in our zero-point machines. In almost 10 years of testing, we’ve had only one supply ever fail, and that was due to impact damage that no editor ever owned up to (Josh!). In a shocking move, we’re stepping back from our previous test bed’s insanely high wattage in favor of a quieter Silencer 750 quad supply.