Viewing page 1 of 7 pages.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NextMarch 10, 2008 by Lawrence
Lee
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Product
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ATI Radeon
HD 3850 256MB
PCI-E Video Card |
Palit Radeon
HD 3870 512MB
PCI-E Video Card |
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Manufacturer
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ATI |
Palit |
|
Street Price
|
~US$170 |
~US$190 |
The ATI Radeon HD 3850
and Palit Radeon HD 3870 were launched late last year to near-unanimous applause from hardware reviewers. It's the first time in recent memory that ATI has produced cards obviously competitive with nVidia offerings in the same price category. The midrange price category ($150~$200) of these cards may actually be more important than the high end, as it represents where the bulk of DIY graphics cards are sold. The HD 3800 series is the first to be DirectX 10.1
compliant and is geared towards 3D performance.
Both of our review samples use the stock ATI reference
coolers. Normally, gaming cards equipped with stock coolers would be dismissed as
inadequate for a well-cooled silent PC, at least not without significant modification.
However, these cards are not the power guzzling behemoths of GPUs past —
ATI is claiming lower power consumption, lower temperatures and
quieter fans. If this holds true, it may be possible for us to have our gaming
cake and eat it too.
We'll also be looking at how well ATI's Unified Video Decoder (UVD) performs
in a relatively low-end system (by modern standards). UVD is a piece of hardware
incorporated into the GPU core that helps offload a significant portion of video
decompression of H.264 and VC-1 content, allowing for relatively low CPU usage
during playback. UVD is available on all of ATI's HD series graphics cards except
for the HD 2900 line.
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Side by side, the HD 3870 (top) and HD 3850 (bottom)
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| Ultimate Microsoft®
DirectX® 10.1 Performance |
You’ll be blown away
by life-like graphics from the latest DirectX® 10.1 games, with stunning
3D graphics and shading effects. |
| Over 1 teraFLOPS of Compute
Power |
up to 640 stream processors
(320 x 2) on a single card deliver the raw horsepower to attack the most
demanding graphics applications |
|
ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU
|
Upgrade to even greater
3D performance quickly and easily thanks to plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX
technology with up to quad-GPU support. |
|
PCI Express® 2.0
|
Get ready for the most demanding
graphics applications with PCI Express 2.0 support, which allows up to twice
the throughput of current AMD PCI Express cards. |
| Unified Video Decoder |
View and manipulate the
latest Blu-ray and HD DVD content with a dedicated hardware video decoder
that leaves your CPU free to perform other tasks. |
| Ultimate Image Quality |
Performance that rivals
high-end HD-DVD and Blu-ray players on displays with resolutions that exceed
1080p – up to 2560x1600. |
| Integrated Digital Outputs |
Enjoy your digital content
the way you want to, with built-in HDMI that includes 5.1 surround audio
for big screen entertainment. |
| More Processing Performance
per Watt |
Get up to twice the Gigaflops
per watt of previous generations of high-end AMD GPUs. |
| ATI PowerPlay™ Technology
|
Power saving features that
reduce power consumption at idle or during low-usage. |
| Runs Cool and Quiet |
With a smaller chip designed
to use less power, your system can take advantage of high-end Windows Vista®
features while running more efficiently and quieter than ever. |
ATI's marketing emphasizes the HD 3800 series' video playback capabilities,
low power draw, and cool / quiet operation. The two cards utilize the same
core though the HD 3870 is clocked significantly higher: 775Mhz vs. 670Mhz core/shader
frequencies, 2250Mhz vs. 1660Mhz memory frequency, and 72GB/s vs. 53GB/s of
memory bandwidth. Our HD 3850 sample has half the video memory (256MB) of the
HD 3870 but a 512MB variant is also available. Both are fairly lanky cards,
approximately 23.15cm long from one edge of the PCB to the other.
| Help support this site, buy the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 Video Card from one of our affiliate retailers! |
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