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| Introduction | ||||||
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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.
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: |
| Sapphire Ultimate Radeon HD3850 |
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First up is the Ultimate HD 3850, which ships in a glossy box with a busty female wielding a long blade. We don't quite remember exactly when or where the placing of warrior princesses began on PC hardware, but it doesn't appear to be a trend that's about to end anytime soon. A small sticker labels this as the Ultimate version which, as we pointed out earlier, differs from Sapphire's original release by upping the memory to 512MB and slapping on a passive cooler.
The GPU die and RAM are completely covered by a very slim heatplate, with a cutout for some circuitry. Above this plate is a branded metal cover protecting an area where three heatpipes meet a copper section placed directly over the GPU. The copper provides a better medium for conducting heat away from the GPU and into the heatpipes which, in turn, whisk it away to the backside of the card. Just above the heatsink are the two CrossFire connectors, which will allow 2 (and later more) similar Radeons to be combined to increase performance. The RV670 GPU is less power hungry than than the previous generation, and thus only requires a single 6-pin MOLEX power connection.
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| Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD3870 |
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The Atomic HD 3870's packaging is the kind of stuff that will get you stopped in airports and public places, as silver briefcases with day-glo atoms might send out the wrong message. Seriously, the briefcase concept is a great way to showcase Sapphire's high-end product and it prominently advertises their gaming-oriented Atomic website. The sticker used for "HD 3870" probably indicates that we will see the case used again for future Atomic branded products as well. Our only concern with the packaging is that once the card is installed, what is there left to do with the metal briefcase? More clutter for the lab or home-office, we suppose, but first impressions do count and Sapphire wins in this department.
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| Test System and 3DMark06 Results | ||||||||||||||
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HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested all of the graphics cards used in this article on an MSI P6N Diamond motherboard powered by a Core 2 Duo E6600 processor and 2GB of low-latency Corsair RAM. The first thing we did when configuring our test systems was enter into the BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS, and installed the latest DX10 redist and various hotfixes along with the necessary drivers and applications.
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| Half-Life 2: Episode 2 | ||||||
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In our first of many games that we benchmarked, the Sapphire Radeons did not fare as well as could be expected. At the lower resolution, the faster Atomic HD 3870 still found itself from 9-11 frames behind the 8800 cards. This delta doubled once we raised the resolution to 1600x1200. The Atomic's higher speeds, however, consistently manage to keep it a few frames above the reference model. Even with the larger frame buffer on the Ultimate version of the HD3850, this card still finds itself far behind the rest of the pack due to its lower clock speeds. |
| Company of Heroes | ||||||
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The higher GPU and memory speeds of the Atomic HD 3870 don't translate as well in Company of Heroes, with modest gains of about a frame per second at either resolution. The Ultimate HD 3850 struggles a bit with this benchmark, barely reaching 30 fps at 1280x1024 and slipping further at 1600x1200 to just under 24 fps. |
| Enemy Territory: Quake Wars | ||||||
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id's games have always fared better on GeForce cards, which partially helps explain the wide margin between the 8800s and the three Radeon HD 38xx cards at 1280x1024. Raising the in-game resolution seems to level the playing field somewhat, as we saw a much larger performance hit on the two NVIDIA cards when compared to the Radeons. |
| Crysis | ||||||
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Even without Anti-Aliasing, the most powerful card in our suite only breaks the 30 fps barrier at 1280x1024 with the rest of the benchmarks falling mostly between 15-25 frames per second. As seen in previous games, the two HD 3870s are separated by about a frame in each of our testing runs. The HD 3850's performance lies some 20% behind either of the Radeon HD 3870s. |
| Bioshock | ||||||
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When using DX10 rendering paths for Bioshock, we found that the Radeon HD 38xx cards fell far behind the performance levels of the GeForce 8800 cards with frame rates that were a third less or more at the lower resolution. Jumping to 1600x1200 cut the GeForces down to size, with each card falling into the 60 fps range wherea the performance hit is much less for any of the Radeons. For example, where there was a 29% difference between the 8800 GTX and Atomic HD 3870 at 1280x1024, it was halved to 14% at 1600x1200. |
| PT Boats: Knights of the Sea | ||||||
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PT Boats is the only non-FPS game in our testing, but it is just as punishing as Crysis on graphic cards. Originally we had planned on using 4xAA but this resulted in mostly single digit frame rates with some odd anomalies so we decided to ease back a bit and disable AA for now. The results are in line with what we've seen in the other benchmarks with the 8800s in the front, the two HD 3870s in the middle with very similar frame rates, and the HD 3850 posting the lowest, yet still respectable, scores. |
| Overclocking Results | ||||
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Although the Atomic HD 3870 comes pre-overclocked and the Ultimate HD 3850 lacks active cooling, we still wanted to see if there was any room left to raise speeds further. Doing so doesn't require anything other that the Catalyst drivers themselves. We went in to the Overdrive section, noted the default speed and slowly raised the core and memory speeds until we either saw visual artifacts while running a game or benchmark, or noticed any other system instability.
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| Performance Summary and Conclusion | ||||||||
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Performance Summary: The Sapphire Ultimate Radeon HD 3850 and Atomic HD 3870 cards performed as expected throughout our battery of tests. The Atomic card's higher GPU core and memory clock speeds allowed it to outperform a reference Radeon HD 3870 card in every benchmark. The performance deltas separating the two 3870 cards were not very large, however. The Ultimate HD 3850 card's 512MB frame buffer helped its performance at higher resolutions, but it couldn't quite compete with the 3870 due to its lower clock speeds.
The Radeon HD 3850 is admittedly the less powerful of the two 3800 series Radeons, originally equipped with half of the memory and slower GPU frequencies. Sapphire upped the memory to 512MB with their model, however, which helps performance at higher resolutions, but they didn't budge on the core and memory speeds. Instead, the Ultimate is geared toward silent operation, making it a better choice for HTPCs or other machines where gaming performance is not the sole reason for their existence.
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