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Reviews Around The Web
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
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The latest HD 3870 X2 to make its way into the labs comes in the form of a stock clocked Sapphire. We actually haven't checked out the X2 on our new test bed in any real detail, so we'll have to see how it goes here today. If you're looking for a HD 3870 X2 that doesn't do anything but produce some good numbers, this could be the card for you. Fortunately, there is only one way to find out so let's get stuck into the card and see what we have on our hands today before we get into the benchmarks.
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Monday, March 3, 2008
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The Sapphire HD3870 Atomic arrived Technic3D. The Radeon HD 3870 Graphic Card with Vapor-X Single-Slot Cooler and 825 MHz Core Clock. Technic3D will see that in the following Review with 1920x1200 up to 1280x1024 on Windows Vista and DirectX 10.
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Monday, February 25, 2008
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We sometimes forget that not everyone has the money or the need to use these higher end cards. So that's what we're doing today, we're going to look after the people on the other side of the fence, who don't need big 3DMark numbers or 200FPS in Half Life 2 at 2560 x 1600. Today we'll simply have the two cards together. We won't be comparing them against each other as such, but rather just simply looking at exactly how they perform and how much extra performance a HD 3650 gives you over the HD 3450.
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Friday, February 15, 2008
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The first board we received had quite serious issues, and while we accept this happens sometimes things only half got better when we received a new board. At first the old board had serious overheating issues - the aluminium heatsink would get far too hot and it would require active cooling otherwise our 125W AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ would lock up when it was running our benchmarks. Thankfully, this second board didn't suffer the same problems - the heatsink gets warm, but now not to the point where it starts glowing red.
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Thursday, February 14, 2008
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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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Tuesday, February 5, 2008
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Sapphire's Radeon HD 3870 512MB Atomic is a ground breaking product in many respects, but sadly where it falls short at the moment is on the performance side of things. From what we understand, since the launch of the Radeon HD 3870 X2, the RV670 chips are suffering from even higher demand than they were before. This has resulted in the prices of the standard cards increasing slightly, and bringing them more into line with Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT.
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Monday, February 4, 2008
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Last week AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series, which are the new low-end graphics processors compared to the Radeon HD 3800 series. These budget graphics cards are branded as the Radeon HD 3450, 3470, and 3650 and are all available for under $100 USD. While they may be cheap, they are the first graphics cards to introduce support for DisplayPort. DisplayPort is the newest digital display interface standard, backed by VESA, and is direct competition to HDMI. DisplayPort has yet to be fully supported by the available Linux display drivers, but the Catalyst Linux driver already supports these new ATI graphics cards and there will be open-source support through the RadeonHD driver in the coming days. At hand today we have the Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB graphics card as we deliver the first Linux benchmarks for this RV635 GPU.
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Monday, January 28, 2008
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Sapphire's new HD 3870 Atomic Edition is a special version of the Radeon HD 3870 with a single slot cooler. This is only possible because Sapphire uses a new cooling technology called Vapor-X cooling that improves cooling performance considerably while keeping noise down. Another plus of this card is that it comes overclocked out of the box with full warranty.
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Friday, January 25, 2008
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Sapphire takes the reference design, throws it out and starts again.
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Unlike most reference 3850s, the Ultimate HD 3850 has a 512MB frame buffer and is outfitted with a passive heat-pipe cooling system for completely silent operation. The Atomic HD 3870 differs from ATI's reference design as well and features higher GPU and memory speeds, a fancy single-slot cooling solution that leverages Microloops' Vapor-X technology, and it has one of the best bundles we have seen in quite a while. Come on by the site and check them out...
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Friday, January 4, 2008
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Moving onto the card itself, the front looks a bit weird with a large plate covering most of the front and three little pipes heading out the top and going around the back. To the right of the card you can also see a heatsink covering some of the hotter components on the card. Since this is the first stock clocked HD 3850 we have been greeted with we thought we would check it out against the overclocked HD 3850 from GECUBE along with the stock clocked 8800GT for good measure.
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A few weeks ago Sapphire launched the Atomic homepage with content aimed at the enthusiast market. Driver Heaven now have the first of their enhanced products, the Atomic HD 3870. With this card Sapphire have done all they can to improve on the reference design and in addition to this the overall package has also been enhanced. Let us take a look at what makes this particular 3870 so special.
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Monday, December 17, 2007
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The Sapphire HD3870 offers several great features such as 512MB of GDDR4 memory, HDMI support, DirectX 10 support, HD support, and Crossfire X support to name a few.
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Sapphire don't mess with the green camp; they're ATI through and through. This means that they don't just deal with the high end cards though, it also means they cover mid-range and budget cards, even old technologies like AGP. Today we have the 2600 Pro 512mb from Sapphire on an AGP platform. How does it compare to our P4's old favourite, the x1950 Pro? Let's see.
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Monday, December 10, 2007
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As I said during my Radeon HD 3870 architectural review, I'm a big fan of the product and I believe that Sapphire's implementation is a good one. While Sapphire hasn't changed much in terms of card design-it's essentially a reference card wearing Sapphire-branded make up-the company has included a comprehensive bundle in the box. And when you factor in that most of what?s included in the box is useful, the deal just sweetens itself a bit.
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