A Closer Look

The external component of the watercooling loop is dominated by the big 120mm fan which sits directly in front of the radiator.


On the side you have to connect a Molex to supply power to the pump, fan and control circuitry inside the external part.


The top includes a big Sapphire ATOMIC logo and some instructional text to avoid any mistakes during installation. Given the big name "Sapphire" and the positioning of this product I would have expected better English grammar though.


Sapphire's HD 3870 X2 Atomic can be combined with any other HD 3870 X2 or HD 3870 to form a QuadCF or TripleCF rig. Unfortunately the watercooling loop can not be extended to cool the second card as well. So you would need quite a big case that has space for two of the cooling assemblies, not to mention the big wallet to afford the cards.


ATI's HD 3870 X2 design uses one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector to deliver the juice to this hungry beast.


Sapphire has also covered the voltage regulator area of the card with the waterblock. However, under heavy use these can easily reach 100°C, which is a normal operating temperature for these components.


The GDDR3 chips (why not GDDR4, Sapphire?) are made by Samsung and have the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. They have a cycle time of 1.0 ns (= 1000 MHz). Since the memory chips on the back of the card are not cooled it is understandable that Sapphire did not go with 0.8 ns chips here.


The bridge chip is the same PCI-E 1.1 chip as on the first cards, while it would limit the bandwidth in theory, there is not much to be gained from going 2.0 here, other than higher cost.


Two RV670 GPUs are present on this board, they are made in a 55nm process at TSMC with 666M transistors.