Sapphire HD 3850 1024 MB

[W1zzard]

AMD's Radeon HD 3850 Series has been on the market for a while now. Add-in-Board Partners are constantly looking for ways to seperate themselves from the competition and that's why Sapphire has engineered a Radeon HD 3850 with 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory and faster core clock out of the box. But can a card like this really benefit from 1 GB of video memory?

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[OnBoard]

Like that it has all the memory chips on one side, backside memory is so 2005 If you were to crossfire two of these, wouldn't the bigger memory help them? Like you don't get 1024MB of mem with 2x512MB cards in crossfire. Other than that it's an overkill.

 

[a111087]

lol, just as everyone expected, memory didn't do much
but the more memory sapphire sell the better for them ...

 

[btarunr]

It's only a little faster than a 256M HD3850. For $230 you're better off buying a reference-design HD3870.

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

It's only a little faster than a 256M HD3850. For $230 you're better off buying a reference-design HD3870.

agreed. rather spend my 230 and get a gddr4 512 card and have a better cooler.

 

[eidairaman1]

the ram only comes in use with Ultra High Resolutions.

 

[InfDamarvel]

It did overclock to HD3870 speeds where it did beat it out pretty easily though.

 

[InnocentCriminal]

Good review W1zzard!

I guess this card, when paired & watercooled in an adequately spec'd system, these would be quite beneficial for people wanting to play at large resolutions of 1680 x 1050 and above.

Hmmm....

 

[mdm-adph]

Makes me wonder... if two of these cards will theoretically cost about $460, then when is someone going to come out with a 3870 X2 2GB?

 

[rodneyhchef]

Quite an unusual looking card compared to other 3850s! Nice to see sapphire going back to blue PCBs. What's the deal with only a 2-pin fan connector though? Seems like a step backwards to me

 

[W1zzard]

most ati pcb designs make no use of the "RPM" information

 

[rodneyhchef]

Fair enough! Does it have a failsafe for the fan though? The last card I had with a 2-pin fan connector was an FX5600, which did not have a fail safe and therefore broke when the fan died on it. I suppose with this card, you will hear the fan stop working.

 

[W1zzard]

yeah ccc will kill 3d when temperatures go too high

 

[Random Murderer]

Sapphire's new HD 3850 1 GB uses the same single slot cooler designs as the reference HD 3850.

isn't that the atomic 3870 cooler?


it seems that sapphire has decide to do whatever the hell they please in relation to card designs...
it also seems that despite the higher clocks and more memory, the 3850 1G still gets outpaced by its bigger brother.

 

[lemonadesoda]

Excellent review.

The performance per $ is a nice chart at the end. And very interesting... esp. for AGP users since the 3850 AGP is not only top of the AGP choice, but also a great price/performance contender.

NEXT TIME when doing a review, please put a "previous generation" card in there too... so that people can see the value of upgrading, e.g. X800Pro which is a reference design from 2 years ago. Quite honestly, its not so interesting for TPU users to see so many "budget" cards in the benchmarks as it is to see the "upgrade path" in their older rigs.

 

[W1zzard]

those old cards can not be bought anymore, so cant put them into perf/$ chart

 

[adrianx]

nice review and good one

 

[mdm-adph]

Excellent review.

The performance per $ is a nice chart at the end. And very interesting... esp. for AGP users since the 3850 AGP is not only top of the AGP choice, but also a great price/performance contender.

NEXT TIME when doing a review, please put a "previous generation" card in there too... so that people can see the value of upgrading, e.g. X800Pro which is a reference design from 2 years ago. Quite honestly, its not so interesting for TPU users to see so many "budget" cards in the benchmarks as it is to see the "upgrade path" in their older rigs.

Well, Tom's Hardware has a pretty good chart on the value of upgrading -- it's always at the end of one of their "Best of [Current Month]" for video cards. It shows old cards all the way back to the ATI Rage series and everything.