It seems that AMD is back in the game. Even though their HD 38xx Series can not beat NVIDIA's high-end offerings, the cards come at a much more affordable price point and deliver rock solid performance. For HTPC users who want to use HDMI+audio AMD's cards are the only on the market that also deliver high-quality audio straight from the GPU.
GeCube has done a formidable job releasing a product that is better than AMD's reference HD 3850 cards. The added memory and higher clocks were able to make a difference in most of our benchmarks, especially the added 256 MB help a lot when running at high resolutions like 2048x1536. If this is worth a $30 premium depends on the settings you are going to use that card at. If you play 1280x1024 you will be fine with the cheaper 256 MB version. But once you go to 1600x1200 or beyond and want to use features like AA or high-res textures, then the extra memory will make a big difference. Unfortunately our sample did not allow much more overclocking beyond GeCube's clock rates but this could also be a limitation of the sample we had.