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If only for a very short time, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 once hold the title of the fastest single graphics card solution available. Even when that's no longer true thanks to the GeForce 9800 GX2, it is still certainly one of the best, particularly at its price point. In our eyes, Visiontek has taken an already good product and made it better in a number of appreciable ways.

Although we would not place too much stock in this being an overclocked product given the very marginal performance improvements, the benefits come in drastically reducing operating temperatures. The cooler also looks very impressive, which may help some in justifying this card's hefty price tag. On the negative side, the fans made quite a bit of noise that wasn't the typical loud air movement. Rather the fans made a high pitch squeal that only seemed to go away when fan speed was increased under load.

This problem may only affect our sample, but it is worth mentioning as we found this quite annoying. Nevertheless, compared to the standard ATI reference cooler, this VisionTek version is a significant improvement.

If it was a perfect world, we would have Visiontek charging no premium for the additional features, unfortunately that's not the case. For roughly $50 extra you can take the Visiontek Radeon HD 3870 X2 Overclocked Edition, which may have been more easily justifiable if it came with GDDR4 memory. So, expect to pay top dollar for this card, it is indeed a solid gaming product, but you may want to reassess your options if the extra DVI ports or the improved cooling don't mean much to you.