Sapphire's Ultimate HD 3850 and Atomic HD 3870
It seems like a new year always evokes the feeling of renewed hope and high expectations. And for AMD / ATI at least, 2008 appears to have reinvigorated their graphics division, which appears to be firing on all cylinders at the moment. After a year or so of NVIDIA dominating the high-end graphics space, ATI released the Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850 cards, which have proved to be competent alternatives at their respective price points. Based on the RV670 GPU, the HD 38xx series has been able to provide similar or better performance than the preceding 2900 XT, while running cooler and consuming less power. That, and their lower price points, makes them much more suitable choice for eventually running CrossFireX configurations somewhere down the road.
Of course, as time passes, board partners will go out and take a popular card and "make it their own" so to speak, typically by modifying the cooling solution and/or bumping up the core and memory speeds. Sapphire, as it turns out, always seems up to the challenge. This article features not one, but two cards that offer differing takes on existing products. One card is built with a completely fanless cooling solution, the other is a pre-overclocked, top-of-the line screamer, complete with vapor-cooling. Two cards, separate target audiences, and Sapphire is out to conquer both.
The first model we're going to show you is the Ultimate HD 3850, the name of which applies more to its silent operating mode than its speed or packaging. It does include 512MB of RAM over the original 3850's 256MB, however, and uses a heat-pipe cooling system which does differentiate it from the competition. The latter card is called the Atomic HD 3870. It features higher speeds, fancy single-slot cooling, and one of the best bundles we have seen in a while - it's a card that definitely warrants some attention. Differences abound, but here's a look at the common specs between the two.
ATI Radeon HD 3850 & 3870
Features & Specifications
| 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
256bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface Ring Bus Memory Controller
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10 / 10.1
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
Anti-aliasing features
CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology
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Texture filtering features
ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface OpenGL 2.0 support
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;)
As we've covered the architecture of the HD 3850 and HD 3870 in-depth in the past, we won't go into heavy detail in this article. Instead, we suggest you take a look at the following articles for some background information:
ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870
ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
What isn't fully covered there, is that the RV670 is the first GPU that supports DirectX 10.1. This update to the API brings with it better support for multi-sample anti-aliasing, improved shadow filtering capabilities, and better support for multi-core systems. Also, a major addition will be the mandatory use of 32-bit floating point filtering (over the 16-bit filtering found in DX9 and DX10) that will make HDR rendering even more dynamic. With Vista SP1 supposedly only weeks away, it's always good to see hardware out there that will be ready to utilize these new features, even if game developers won't support them right out of the gate.
