Sapphire Ultimate 3850 vs 3870

[Asulc]

Is it worth the difference in price to upgrade from 3850 to 3870 (don't have either at the moment)?

How does the temperature differ?

[Asulc]

Well I can find the power consumption of performance elsewhere. Does anyone know where I can buy the sapphire 3870 ultimate?

[FartingBob]

Is it worth it? Well possibly. It depends what you use it for. You really need to give us more info. I presume you game, but how often and what games? How often do you tend to upgrade your system? Whats your CPU? What resolution do you game at?

[Asulc]

I do a little with crysis, but not much. Mostly Madden and the such. I will be getting a E8400 very soon and a 24 inch monitor, so that is 1920x1200.

After this upgrade, I will not be upgrading for a while.

[smilingcrow]

I do a little with crysis, but not much. Mostly Madden and the such. I will be getting a E8400 very soon and a 24 inch monitor, so that is 1920x1200. After this upgrade, I will not be upgrading for a while.

If you’ll be running games at 1920x1200 you’ll need all the help you can get so I would recommend the HD 3870. If you can wait a bit the HD 4850 will supposedly be released on June 25th but I doubt a passive version will be released in any hurry so it may not appeal to you; I can’t see the HD 4870 getting the passive treatment.

I have a HD 3850 O/C 512MB and it came with a two slot cooler that has a decent size copper heatsink. I removed the plastic enclosure and fan and attached a slow spinning 80mm fan and it idles at 42C and the temps are fine under load.
The fan was rubbing against the enclosure so I was sent a replacement so I have a spare that I can very likely use with a HD 4850 as it seems to have exactly the same layout. I got lucky there as I picked it up for a bargain price and the spare cooler means I can upgrade to a stock HD 4850 and I have a silent cooling solution ready to drop in.

What I’m trying to suggest is that if you buy a card with a decent dual slot copper cooler you can quickly and easily modify it to take an 80mm fan which won’t add to the noise; the only tool I used was a screwdriver and I use a fanmate to drop the fan speed to < 600 RPM.
It saves waiting for a fanless version to be released which can take forever and they can be hard to source in certain countries and the price can be high to. I expect that my custom job runs cooler than a passive card also although I know some people are very seduced by passively cooled components.

[Richy]

Is it worth the difference in price to upgrade from 3850 to 3870 (don't have either at the moment)?

How does the temperature differ?

I have a Sapphire Ultimate 3870 with the large passive heatsink. Good card really and pushes Call of Duty4 and Race Driver Grid along at 1600x1200, without stutter. Heatsink is quite large on the back of the card so you may want to check you have room on your motherboard. My board is an Abit IP35 Pro. Downside is it gets VERY hot when pushed. The GPU temp playing Grid rose as high as 93c and this is in an Antec P150 case with good airflow through the case.

At 93c (and could possibly have gone higher?) I'm a little worried it's getting too hot? Don't know what anyone else thinks? A scrabble through my 'parts box' turned up an old graphics card that had a Zalman
VF900-Cu LED heatsink and fan fitted after the original fan failed. I've taken the heatsink off the Sapphire 3870, stuck some ram heatsinks on the VGA ram chips, cleaned the gpu up, added a spot of Artic Silver and bolted the VF 900 straight on. Luckily I'd kept all the parts with the Zalman and I'd not used the supplied ram sinks as the other card had a heatsink attached to the ram chips.

Fan speed is controlled via a fan controller and at lower rpm the Zalman fan is silent. Max temp to date has been 64c which is quite a bit lower

[lemmy]

Is it worth the difference in price to upgrade from 3850 to 3870 (don't have either at the moment)?

How does the temperature differ?

I have a Sapphire Ultimate 3870 with the large passive heatsink. Good card really and pushes Call of Duty4 and Race Driver Grid along at 1600x1200, without stutter. Heatsink is quite large on the back of the card so you may want to check you have room on your motherboard. My board is an Abit IP35 Pro. Downside is it gets VERY hot when pushed. The GPU temp playing Grid rose as high as 93c and this is in an Antec P150 case with good airflow through the case.

At 93c (and could possibly have gone higher?) I'm a little worried it's getting too hot? Don't know what anyone else thinks? A scrabble through my 'parts box' turned up an old graphics card that had a Zalman
VF900-Cu LED heatsink and fan fitted after the original fan failed. I've taken the heatsink off the Sapphire 3870, stuck some ram heatsinks on the VGA ram chips, cleaned the gpu up, added a spot of Artic Silver and bolted the VF 900 straight on. Luckily I'd kept all the parts with the Zalman and I'd not used the supplied ram sinks as the other card had a heatsink attached to the ram chips.

Fan speed is controlled via a fan controller and at lower rpm the Zalman fan is silent. Max temp to date has been 64c which is quite a bit lower

Whew - that seems excessively hot for that card - even with just the Heatpipe solution. Was there a change in your idle temperatures between the cooling solutions?

[Richy]

Lemmy - yes, the gpu now idles at around 42c where with the stock passive heatsink idle temp was around 57c.

Room temp here is about 20c. The Antec P150 case has good airflow through with 12cm intake and exhaust fans. The intake I fitted a single 12cm instead of the original 2 (9cm) intakes. CPU is a C2D E6400 overclocked @ 3GHz and cores tick over at about 39 to 42c.

After posting I did a search and found no other reports of this card running hot. Reports were few and far between but temps were reported well within acceptable limits. Temps up north of 90c had me worried and with side off case there was no need to touch the heatsink as you could 'smell' the heat! Dismantling the heatsink off the card there was a good mm of 'gunk' between it and the gpu. Having said that heat was being transfered to the heatsink as it was plenty hot enough! The Zalman VF 900 is a good fan and heatsink and ran in a home made NAS box untill the motherboard failed on that. Never bothered to rebuild and so the Zalman became surplus to requirements. The fan is too noisy for a silent system @ 12v but slowed down soon becomes inaudible but still cools the gpu.

My Sapphire Ultimate 3870 I'm very pleased with. The two games I've played look very good maxxed up at 1600x1200 and get no 'stutter'. It isn't overclocked as I don't think there is much to be gained. I'm disapoineted it got so hot but at least I still had the Zalman and it's just as silent as the passive solution (though NOT at 12v!)

[breunor]

I'm thinking that those cards are ok if under 100c, although of course the lower the better. I'd agree on the 3870, and replace the heatsink, I'm considering it with an Accelero, and have a 12cm fan at the front of the card blowing down its length and out the back via open pci slots.

[lemmy]

Richy - thanks for the detailed information.

I've got the 3850 version of that card and even during the most recent freakish heatwave here - it was over 90 Farenheit here for 4 straight days - the GPU temperature never got above 60 Celcius in my e521 after several hours of gaming. That was in a room that was 25-26 Celcius.

[Richy]

I had a go at Race Driver Grid again last night. It was that game that pushed the temps north of 92c. Running the temp monitoring app in Rivatuner the temp never went above 62c and that was with the Zalman fan turned right down (via a ZalmanZM-MFC1 fanbus) in silent mode.

I did think of fitting a large fan to blow air across the passive heatsink for when the gpu was working hard but in the end the Zalman (I already had) seemed the simpler to fit. Does fit very well BTW with good face to face contact and the smallest amount of Artic Silver inbetween.

Got to say I like the Sapphire 3870, as to Race Driver Grid then it sure does look good maxxed up but as to actuall gameplay I'm on the fence at the moment.