ATI's Radeon HD 3850 is the grizzled veteran in this comparison. This card has been around for some time, ever since it's faster sibling the Radeon HD 3870 was unable to steal the limelight away from the 8800 GTX and its ilk. Although at first glance its core specifications seem to put it into a league of perfor¬mance cards the reality wasn't so for ATI - sadly the HD 3870 failed, and so did the HD 3850 from its allotted task to steak the GeForce 8800 GT's thunder. With a GDDR3 memory interface and a whopping 320 SPs the Radeon HD 3850 has seen a huge fall from grace ... and price. Cards based on this GPU are actually terrific bang for buck. The only demerit is these cards run hotter than the GeForce 9600 GTs, of course they're older chipsets as well.



Features

We got four Radeon HD 3850 based cards - one each from ASUS, Palit, Sapphire and PowerColor. ASUS and Sapphire provide DVl to HDMI adapters. The other two Le. Palit and PowerColor actually provide an HDMl port on the rear panel of their cards. PowerColor provides a D-Sub port too, at the expense of one DVI port. All vendors supply all the necessary cables and connectors though nobody bothers with any games.

Performance

ASUS uses DDR2 RAM on their HD 3850 and give you an extra 512 ME. All other vendors use faster GDDR3 memory and make do with 512 ME. PowerColor overclocked their card to a 720 MHz core; all other vendors kept their cards at the default 670 MHz. As expected the ASUS HD 3850 was notice¬ably slower than the other cards because of its slower memory. This shows that just having more RAM isn't a guarantee of performance ¬the memory should be clocked fast too. This also proves that today's games are bandwidth hogs. It's also possible that the extra frame buffer isn't being used by those 320 SPs. Besides Crysis and World In Conflict this card can handle all the games we tested it's performance under. We noticed these cards are noticeably slower than the 9600 GT and 9600 GSO GPUs.