Powercolor HD 3850 Xtreme 512 MB

[W1zzard]

PowerColor's new HD3850 Xtreme is full of customization compared to the reference design. Instead of two DVI ports it has one DVI and one HDMI port which supports HD video playback with HDCP and digital audio straight off the GPU. In addition to that a custom cooler by Zerotherm ensures that the card stays cool no matter what you throw at it. Another bonus is that the memory size has been doubled to 512 MB of 1.0 ns GDDR3 memory.

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[DrunkenMafia]

Great review W1zz... :toasst:

When are we going to see a 3870 review??? that is what i am interested to see. I know the 3850 is midrange and the results are pretty much exactly where they should be in all the tests but it would be nice to see some 3870 graphs in there too..

 

[mandelore]

interesting, and that all the new ATI cards still get pwned by the 2900xt... aint we meant to be going a step forwards not back?

granted, the newer cards have some nice features, but we want some killer performance

 

[Vegnagun666]

I don't think I will buy a nwer ATI card anytime soon

 

[mdm-adph]

Strange... according to those tests, I don't see much of an advantage in getting the 3870 over this card... is it the increased RAM over the 256MB that 3850's usually have?

 

[choppy]

this is a £115 card, why bother paying £150 for similar performance?!

w1zz (or anyone else), can you tell me the length of this card? wanna know if it'll fit in my case, cheers

 

[Batou1986]

Any word on a release date to retail ?

 

[choppy]

Any word on a release date to retail ?

yes, its already selling lol! which country are you in, its selling in the uk for £115 which is very cheap imo

 

[nubie]

need unlocked bios.

the bios still limit this card @862 gpu clock, i ve tried it with 1.4 gpu vcore (pencil mod)
will be fantastic if amd/anyone release unlocked bios

 

[DRDNA]

For the price to performance I am impressed.... as for the proformance itself I am not at all impressed.I will be waiting even longer for my next ATI/AMD upgrade.

 

[Batou1986]

damn i hope this makes it to us market

in fact id be willing to pay for someone to ship it from uk to us cause its way cheaper there 115 euro that 165 usd thats cheaper than the 256 version here which is like 200+

 

[btarunr]

Great price, really. It does outperform the HD3870 in some tests. I didn't like the cooler though. The memory banks are left to cool by natural convection--bad. While you can OC the GPU better with this cooler, you dare not take the memory too far. Because heating the memory affects the bandwidth adversely.

However, another thing I noticed was that the HD 2900 XT 512M was outperforming the 1GB version in many tests. Why is that?

 

[Xaser04]

Just thought I would point out that my powercolor HD3850 512mb has a copper plate (or at least it looks like copper) covering the memory chips (this is not seen on the card in the pictures above)

As for overclocking well my card is crysis gaming stable (tested on both the benchmarking program and also half an hour in game) @ 760/1900 however this is the max clocks allowed by the CCC overdrive program. I will try with ATI tool this evening.

Temp wise the card seemed to hover around the mid 40's when running crysis (measured using rivatuner on my second monitor).

The extra memory of this card really helps in crysis as I can not run mostly high settings at 1680x1050 whereas before I was limited to medium settings due to a lack of vram.

It is interesting to note from the benchmarks just how close this card can come to the 3870 despite being clocked significantly lower.

 

[Xaser04]

However, another thing I noticed was that the HD 2900 XT 512M was outperforming the 1GB version in many tests. Why is that?

I think this is due to 2 factors,

1) IIRC the 1GB model of the 2900XT runs GDDR4 memory which on this card has a higher latency and so is slower clock for clock than the GDDR3 512mb model

2) The extra memory is not used.

 

[Sly.P.I.]

100% fan on powercolor 3850

Great card apart from 100% fan all the time!
Anyone figured out how to get fan control on these powercolor 3850's?
I've unplugged the fan all together and strapped on a 120mm one.
Could do with the space back in my case though now!
Will a different bios get the fan control?
Please help
Ste

 

[miloshs]

It's actually the same thing as my Powercolor HD3870 512MB DDR4... same cooler from zerotherm, the only thing that is different is that the cooler on the 3870 does include DDR4 heatsinks.
I'm really starting to like Powercolor...

update:This looks like a viable option to consider for running CF with my 3870 + this card!