Diamond HD 3850 Ruby Edition 512MB

A Closer Look

The cooler consists of three parts. The black metal heatsink base makes contact with the GPU core, but does not touch the memory. The fan is sitting on top of that and creates airflow which goes through the fins and right across the memory. Considering the memory overclocks we saw with our cards this is a great solution and seems to work very well. On top of the base/fan assembly sits a metal casing for improved looks.


CrossFire is supported of course, even the new CrossFireX which will work with up to four GPUs in the future can be used once the ATI drivers support it.


Near the back of the card you find a single six pin PCI-Express power connector. It is required for operation at all times, even when the card is running in PCI-E 2.0 mode which has a higher power delivery capability over the bus.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. With 1.0 ns latency (= 1000 MHz) they should have some headroom left for overclocking.


The GPU is the ATI RV670 which is made in a 55nm process at TSMC.