A Closer Look

The cooler uses an array of copper fins attached to a circular heatpipe that goes around the core. The base plate is made from copper as well and polished to a mirror finish.


A second heatsink is located near the back of the card. It is simply a chunk of metal which cools the voltage regulation circuitry (I reused the pics of the GeCube 3850 review because I did not feel comfortable pulling the cooler off, it is attached very well).


You can use this card in CrossFire with any other Radeon HD 3850. If you use reference design cards, both cards will clock down to the lowest clock speed and adjust their framebuffer sizes to match each other. This means that your card will disable 256 MB of video memory and run with 256 MB only if you pair it with a 256 MB 3850 Pro.
Also it is possible to run triple or quad-CrossFire next year with this card, called "CrossFireX". But since performance of this is to be determined yet, I would not buy a card only for the purpose of being able to run CrossFireX. Don't forget you will also need to purchase the appropriate motherboard and CPU.


Even though PCI-Express 2.0 has a higher power delivery capability, the card needs a 6-pin power connector for operation. This is also the case on a PCI-Express 2.0 capable motherboard - the power connector is always required. Also it is important to note that this card will work fine on any PCI-E 1.0 or 2.0 motherboard. Both standards are interchangeable. The main benefit of PCI-E 2.0 is that bandwidth per pin is doubled, so a 2.0 x16 link has the bandwidth a regular x32 link would have.


Eight GDDR3 memory chips are arranged neatly around the ATI RV670 GPU. Further to the right, the area with the black chips, is the power circuitry which is covered by a smaller heatsink as we showed you a bit further up the page.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A, they have 1.0 ns latency so some nice overclocking should be possible.


The GPU is AMD RV670, which is fabricated in a 55nm process and sports 666 million transistors.