Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby Edition
With recent price cuts to current generation Radeon HD 3800 series cards, due to increased competition from new mainstream graphics cards from NVIDIA, there is a large gap in ATI's product stack between the sub-$200 Radeon HD 3870 and the now roughly $400 Radeon HD 3870 X2. Until AMD readies a new batch of GPUs to fill this hole in their product stack, board partners are left to tweak current designs to entice potential consumers.
Diamond is one of a group of manufacturers that continue to release updated revisions of both Radeons, either by adding additional memory, raising clock speeds, or sometimes both. The model we will be taking a look at today is the Viper Radeon HD 3850 512MB Overclocked Ruby Edition - perhaps one of the longest names for a single product that we've come across. Like the Sapphire Ultimate HD 3850 that we evaluated back in January, the Viper Radeon HD 3850 512MB Overclocked Ruby Edition's frame buffer has been doubled from 256MB to 512MB. Additionally, Diamond has gone an extra step and raised GPU and memory speeds from the default 670/830MHz of reference designs to 725/900MHz. Higher speeds and more memory just might be what the doctor ordered to make the Diamond Viper HD 3850 512MB a bit more competitive in an already crowded field.
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| 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
256bit 8-channel GDDR3 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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CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology
ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface OpenGL 2.0 support
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In order to really get a handle on how the Viper performes we're going to pit it against the aforementioned Sapphire HD 3850 and also compare it to an ATI Radeon HD 3870 for good measure. With the basic architecture remaining the same, we fully expect that the boost in speeds will simply pull the Diamond version up ahead of Sapphire's model. What we're even more interested in seeing is how close we can get to the HD 3870, the price of which has dropped steadily in recent days making it a much more attractive purchase. Finally, we will also throw in some numbers from two of NVIDIA's cards with similar, although slightly higher, price points: the GeForce 8800 GT and an 8800 GTS 512MB from PNY for a full spectrum of analysis.
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