Closer Look:

The Graphics Card

What we have here is a surprisingly light weight upper echelon graphics card. Considering the card's length, you might expect a slightly heavier card as you think back to the X2900XT brick. Gigabyte did away with the stock cooler and made a very, very wise choice in using a Zalman GPU Cooler which has been a good performer back in its day. It's still a good alternative if your stock cooler is just too loud or not cooling the GPU enough. And I think it adds a bit of a nice classy touch to an otherwise, bland reference card.

ZALMAN GPU Cooler

The graphics card is built around Gigabyte's very efficient Ultra Durable 2 design using solid state capacitors, Low RSD Mosfets, and Ferrite Core Chokes to ensure the most reliable power consumption. Compared to previous generation Radeon cards, the HD 3870s have a lot less components which also help lighten up the PCB. Couple the Ultra Durable 2 design with the 55nm ATI Radeon 3870 graphics processor and you have a really stable solution.

Smaller Components

The card requires the common 6-pin PCI Express power connector to produce those really nice pictures you've grown to love. I've always thought that ATI cards seemed to offer a slightly better, more realistic experience even though they didn't quite have the speed of the NVidia based cards. This hasn't kept me from spending my hard earned money on either card.

Ultra Durable 2 Components & 6-pin PCIE Power

The Gigabyte HD 3870 512MB has features like HDMI, HDCP, HDTV, D-SUB, DirectX10.1, PCI Express 2.0, Dual DVI-I and Dual-link DVI viewing. These are all standard features of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 series. Anything less would pretty much come up short. The features that you won't find on lesser cards are more video memory and CrossfireX.

Dual HD Monitor & S-Video Support

Today's upper echelon graphics cards almost all offer 512MB or higher. The ATI HD 3870 comes with 512MB of 256-bit GDDR4 video memory to better serve the 320 Streaming Processors built in to the GPU. The memory chips are Samsung which usually means a pretty good grade IC that lasts a long time. The HD 3850 has a 256MB GDDR3 standard, yet offers the same exact features.

Samsung GDDR4 Video Memory

Gigabyte's HD 3870 GPU frequency specs aren't listed, but GPUZ reported a Core Clock of 780 MHz and 2.25 GHz memory. This is pretty much right on cue with the 3870 specs which are slightly faster than its little brother. The HD 3850 has a 670 MHz Core and 1.66 GHz memory frequency. In all reality, this shouldn't make the HD 3850 all that much slower.

GPUZ - 780MHz Core - 1900MHz Memory

Higher clock and memory frequencies don't always equate in to more performance. We've seen many a driver cause issues which hampered performance. This is one obstacle ATI has some how seemed to run in to now and then. And certain games benefit from ATI GPUs over NVidia GPUs and vice versa. Let us see where the HD 3870 stands.

The Accessories Per Each Card

Neverwinger Nights 2: Forgotten Realm comes bundled with the game. It actually looked pretty nice in single and especially Crossfire mode. The colors were quite rich, the shadows very realistic, and lighting seemed to move pretty smoothly. Sure, this version of NWN2 is not the newest, but it's at least a much more interesting game than the alternative older ones to choose from.

NeverWinter Nights II: Forgotten Realm

'm really not much in to the RPG genre since Diablo 2, but this game brought back some old school memories. The biggest difference between the RPGs I played and the current ones is the better use of the 3D experience. The interaction produces a far better 3D environment than anything I've played before. This brings us to a question: Where is Diablo 3?

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