So I’ve had some odd back and forth issues with the 3870′s so far.  It looks like quite a few games require me to disable Catalyst A.I. which essentially disables Crossfire since it’s required to run.  I did some confirmation of this point by using 3DMark.  With A.I. enabled, I get around a score around 13,800 and without it it comes out to about 10,600 and for all purposes the same as running a single 3870 card.

As for the problem, it’s constant flickering (or scrolling bars like the old TVs and the microwave) in UT3, BF2142 and I believe Crysis.  CoD4 and Valve games (HL2/TF2) seems to handle having A.I. enabled and CoD4 has a setting to enable multiple cards.  This is with the current 8.2 Catalyst drivers.  So I’m disappointed right now that I dropped the cash on 2 of these bastards if I can’t run the games I play the most with Crossfire enabled even with the most current drivers.  I have looked around quite a bit at the gaming forums at AMD and found much of the same.  At least I didn’t go with dual 3870×2′s I guess.

The 3870 on it’s own competes well with my old eVGA 8800GTS and does give a nice 25% boost in 3DMark with the dual cards but who cares if they can’t be enabled on EVERYTHING.

I’ll keep things updated as I find more information…