A Dutch site called Salland Automatisering has started to accept pre-orders for AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card, which has an expected release date of 23rd of January. Earlier reports suggested a retail price of $449 US, although the Dutch site has set a price of €425 which works out at around $615. Admittedly taxes in Europe are higher, and this site may have added a premium as it is the first to allow pre-orders, so $449 in the US isn't completely out of the question.

Although plenty of Radeon HD 3870 X2 pictures have found their way onto the internet, there has been relatively little to look at when it comes to cooling. CHIPHELL has managed to get hold of some nice close-ups, which you can see below. Based on initial impressions, the cooler doesn't look too impressive, but at the end of the day it's real world performance that counts so we'll have to wait and see.

ASUS, producer of top quality graphic solutions has today introduced another top performance overclocking solution - the ASUS EAH3850 TOP/HTDI/512M. Being the world's first EAH3850 TOP model to be equipped with the fastest upgraded DRR3 0.8ns memory modules, users can expect up to 12% improvement in gaming experiences. This powerful graphics card is also equipped with the newest thermal solution - the Glaciator Fansink; that utilizes a unique fansink design to keep GPU temperatures cool.

According to TG Daily, AMD will be releasing its dual-processor R680 graphics card one week early. The NDA on all the technical specs was due to lift on January 28th, but apparantly ATI/AMD have decided to step on the pedal and deliver the card on January 23rd. The upcoming R680 contains two graphics processors on a single board and will eventually allow four processor CrossFire mode on select motherboards. Pictures of the card as well as some early benchmarks can be found on our front page. Also note that the story is yet to be confirmed from anyone at AMD/ATI.

The beta version of the 8.1 Catalyst driver for Windows Vista has found its way onto the internet, although very few details are available so you'll have to try it yourself to find the improvements. The driver works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the OS and should be compatible with all Radeon 9550 and newer cards. The driver can be downloaded here.

ASUS is set to launch a new 0.8ns version of AMD's HD 3850 card, which will feature stock clock speeds of 730MHz core and 1.9GHz memory. The card will be equipped with 512MB of 0.8ns GDDR3 RAM, which should allow for greater overclocking potential and could apparently offer performance gains of up to 12%. The card will also be fitted with ASUS' Glaciator fansink. There is a picture and all of the specs below - they're not in English, but it's pretty easy to understand.

Foxconn is showing off its impressive new Quad CrossFire motherboard at CES, which features no less than 10 slots - four PCI-E 16x, four PCI-E 1x and two standard PCI. The motherboard also has a watercooled northbridge and southbridge. I'll let the pictures say the rest.

Still no specs yet unfortunately, but AMD is showing off its Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card at CES. As you can see, the card has been installed in a system, which would suggest its working - to some extent at least.

Although AMD will officially announce the Radeon HD 3450 and Radeon HD 3470 on January 23th, they intend to give visitors a glimpse of their new product at CES. The Radeon HD 3470 and 3450 both utilize the 55nm TSMC manufactured RV620 Pro and RV620 LE GPUs with core clocks of 800MHz and 600Mhz respectively. Both cards support the PCI Express 2.0 specification, and feature 40 stream processors, full DX10.1, SM4.1, UVD, Powerplay support. The cards will have 64-bit memory interface with 256MB of GDDR3. The Radeon HD 3470 will use 950MHz GDDR3 whereas Radeon HD 3450 will use 500MHz GDDR2. AGP versions of both cards is also expected to arrive in near future.

MADBOXPC.COM claims to have some pictures and specs for AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 3450, 3470 and 3650 graphics cards. The HD 3450, pictured below on the left, uses the RV620 core manufactured using a 55nm process. It will have a core clock of 525MHz with 256MB of 64-bit DDR2 memory running at 800MHz DDR, and apparently it will also feature a DisplayPort output - the price is expected to be around $50. The HD 3470, shown in the middle, features the same RV620 core, although it is expected to run at above 600MHz and have 512MB of 64-bit GDDR3 memory running at 1000MHz DDR, with a price tag of around $60. Finally, the HD 3650, which is shown below on the right, is equipped with the RV635 core, which is also built using a 55nm process, and will run at 800MHz on the XT version and 600MHz on the Pro version. The card is expected to have 256-512MB of 128-bit GDDR3 memory running at 2GHz DDR, and will sell for about $100. Interestingly, there is no mention of DisplayPort despite earlier reports that it will feature on the card, so it may only be used on certain versions.

AMD has updated its Catalyst driver to version 7.12, which supports all ATI Radeon 9500 series and newer graphics cards. The changes in this release include a number of game fixes, a few performance tweaks and enhanced OverDrive support for Radeon HD 2900 cards. Download locations are as follows:

• Windows XP 32-bit - here
• Windows XP 64-bit - here
• Windows Vista 32-bit - here
• Windows Vista 64-bit - here

After the merger between AMD and ATI last year, some doubt was cast upon the relationship between ATI (the firm's graphics division) and major CPU rival Intel. However, it looks like any fears have been put to rest according to DigiTimes, which is claiming that Intel has received a license to support CrossFireX on its upcoming P45 chipsets. Both AMD and Intel have declined to comment.

HotHardware already posted some images earlier this month when it revealed that AMD's upcoming RV635 cards would feature DisplayPort, and now Expreview has managed to find a couple more pictures of the card. It looks quite similar to the current HD 2600, although one major difference is that it doesn't have a CrossFire connector as it will use software CrossFire instead. This card is expected to retail under the name HD 3650, although no firm release date is available yet.

Club3D has silently listed two new cards in its HD 3800 series lineup. Both of the new cards are labelled Overclocked Edition and both of them use the same Zerotherm cooling solution which already features on PowerColor's HD 3800 PCS series.The HD 3870 works at 800MHz for the core and has 512MB of GDDR4 memory working at 1170MHz (2340MHz effective). The HD 3850 works at 720MHz for the core and has 512MB of 900MHz (1800MHz effective) GDDR3 memory.

TUL Corporation today announced the PowerColor HD 3870 512MB SCS3 silence edition; the best performing noiseless graphic card for HD 3870 series. While running passively, this model maintains the original specifications with core engine of 775MHz, 2252MHz effective memory speed, 512MB GDDR3 and 320 stream processing units; it has also built-in HDMI with 5.1 surround audio, supports Microsoft DirectX 10.1, PCI Express 2.0, and ATI CrossFire X technology. This silent cooling solution is expected to launch in January 2008.

If everything goes by plan, in January next year AMD's R680 GPU which consists of two 55nm processor cores, can make its debut. Although not confirmed the R680 will consist of two RV670 GPU cores on the same board, at least according to the specs given. The company also made quick mention of the RV620 and RV635 GPU cores. These cores are nearly identical to the previous RV610 and RV630 processors, but will be produced on the 55nm node instead. As mentioned, all three of AMD's new GPUs are scheduled to launch next month.

Expreview claims to have pictures of a version of the Radeon HD 3850 which uses GDDR4 memory instead of the GDDR3 found on current models. Dubbed the HD 3850 512MB Infinity, this card is built by Unika and uses Hynix 0.8ns memory - and you may notice it also has a non-reference PCB and quite an unusual cooler, which has been designed by Triplex. Apparently this card is clocked at 700MHz core and 2200MHz RAM, and according the Expreview the price will remain at around $200.

More bad news for AMD I'm afraid, this time it's in terms of company value. AMD's share price dropped to its lowest for more than four years last week, leaving the company with a total value of $5 billion US - that's $400 million less than it paid for ATI a year and a half ago. To put things into perspective, AMD's main rival Intel is worth $162 billion, which is more than 32 times more than AMD. Meanwhile, graphics card competitor NVIDIA is worth almost four times as much as AMD with a company value of $19 billion. These are tough times for AMD, and it will be hoping its Phenom processors and its HD 3000 series of graphics cards can get it out of trouble, although the former has not been particularly well received so far.

According to HotHardware, AMD is planning to equip its upcoming graphics cards based on the RV635 core with the new DisplayPort technology, which is expected to be adopted by future monitors. The RV635 cards (at least the XT version) look set to feature DisplayPort alongside HDMI and DVI-D, and whilst there are no monitors that use DisplayPort on the market right now, they are expected to be launched sometime next year. The advantages of this new port are that its micropacket architecture offers significantly more bandwidth with multi-monitor support over a single cable, and it offers the same support for 8-channel 24-bit audio as HDMI as well as a dedicated auxiliary link for control communications of things like panel I/O and microphone connections. There are some pictures below, but there's no word of a release date just yet.

SAPPHIRE Technology, the pioneer of alternative cooling solutions for PC graphics, has just launched a new ULTIMATE Edition in its exciting new HD 3000 series, to deliver the fastest performing passive cooled graphics card in the World - ever!

After being late to market with high-performance graphics offerings for a number of times, ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, is reportedly considering high-end graphics solutions that utilize more than two or, perhaps, even more physical dice. The method has been successfully utilized by Intel Corp., but will it be feasible for graphics processors too? ATI Radeon HD 2900 (R600) graphics chip, which contains about 700 million of transistors had power consumption of 160W, or even more, but still did not manage to demonstrate performance on par with Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, a solution that also demands high amount of power and is rather expensive to manufacture. But ATI Radeon HD 3800 (RV670) graphics processing unit, which is made using 55nm process technology, has the same amount of horsepower as R600, but is cheaper to build and consumes less amount of energy. While two of such ATI RV670 chips would still consume quite a lot of power, they will be able to offer performance and features that were not available before without necessity to develop a chip that would have about 1.3 billion of transistors, the amount of elements that would require very thin process technology - so that the GPU would stay cheap enough to manufacture - and quite a lot of time to design it and verify the lack of bugs.

Sources close to AMD have informed that Advanced Micro Devices has picked up Mike Houston. Houston is known for his work at Stanford University, most notably with the Folding@Home GPGPU client. At this time, it is unclear to us what Houston's title or specific role will be at AMD/ATI.

According to benchmarks which technology site Expreview claims to have carried out, ATI/AMD's new RV620 core could outperform the HD 2400 Pro by as much as 35% despite the two having the same core frequency. On the rather unusual test rig, which featured an Intel Celeron processor, the HD 2400 scored 1123 points in 3DMark06, with the upcoming RV620 scoring 1514 points. If these benchmarks are real, this would suggest that the architecture on the RV620 chip has been significantly improved over its predecessor, although bear in mind that 3DMark scores are by no means conclusive. The RV620 is expected to be named as the Radeon HD 3400 graphics card when it is released to consumers, which is planned to replace the current Radeon HD 2400 cards.

As the title says, here are some more pictures of AMD's new 3870 X2 graphics card. Each of the graphics cores has its own memory controller, and each has its own CrossFire bridge. The cards are expected to be released in January.

A picture is worth a thousand words and this one is surely worth that many. I guess this time we're talking about Radeon HD 3870 X2 for real, it's even working in CrossFire mode. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 has two Radeon HD 3870's on board and is set to be released in Q1 2008 if all goes well. The second, third and fourth pictures show AMD's "Spider" gaming platform running AMD 790FX motherboard and four ATI Radeon HD 3870 video cards in CrossFireX mode.