A Closer Look

The cooler is dominated by a large copper base with attached heatpipes. From there the heat is moved away quickly to a large array of fins with air flowing over them. The design of the cooler will exhaust the hot air outside of the case. You can also see two thermal pad strips which cool the GDDR3 memory.


A second heatsink is located near the back of the card. It is simply a chunk of metal which cools the voltage regulation circuitry.


You can use this card in CrossFire with any other Radeon HD 3850. If you use reference design cards, both cards will clock down the lowest clock speed and adjust their framebuffer sizes to match each other. This means that your X-Turbo III 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 of 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.


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 Hynix and carry the model number HY5RS123235B-11. With a rated speed of 1.1 ns the card should be good for 900 MHz at least.


The GPU is AMD RV670, which is fabricated in a 55nm process. Thanks to the small process size it can pack 666M (number of the beast?) transistors into a smaller footprint than R600 for example. This means that the chip will run cooler and is cheaper to fabricate.