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On the bench today I have a set of Sapphire HD3850 512MB video cards. These cards are the 55nm versions of the hot and heavy HD2900XT. Considering how the 80nm 2900XT was such a power hungry card, moving to 55nm cut down on power consumption tremendously and enabled AMD to spec these cards with a single slot cooler. Today I will only be reviewing a single card as my current Crossfire board is based on the P35 chipset and has a 16x/4x split on the PCIe lanes which results in less than optimal performance. When I review these cards in Crossfire I’ll compare between 16x/16x and 16x/4x for those interested in seeing a budget Crossfire solution.

Package

I’ve been an Nvidia customer for years, since my Geforce 3, and while I dabbled with an x700 Pro back in the day, I haven’t touched an ATI card in over two years. When I received the card in the mail I was expecting an insanely large package, after all I was used to Nvidia boxes which are typically oversized. Upon opening up the boxes, the cards were tightly nestled within a layer of soft foam with an electrostatic bag keeping the cards safe. Underneath the cards were all the necessary peripherals, a DVI to 15-pin converter, molex to 6-pin power adapter, a S-video to component adapter, a thin installation pamphlet, and a driver CD. All these components were what I’d consider to be standard but that 6-pin power adapter which could be a lifesaver for consumers with older power supplies lacking the PCIe 6-pin power cable.

Specifications

On paper the HD3850 is a rather well equipped card. Featuring a 256-bit ringbus architecture with 666 million transistors composing the core and 256 or 512 megabytes of GDDR3 and 689MHz core and 1656MHz memory. Compared to it’s slightly faster sibling the HD3870 with it’s 512 megabytes of GDDR4 and 775MHz core and 2250MHz memory, the HD3850 begins to look a little less promising until you factor in price. The 512MB HD3850 is currently retailing for roughly $180 to $190 while the 512MB HD3870 retails for $240 to $250. So how does this midrange card with performance heritage stand up to the test?

Testbed

Since I still haven’t received my X48 motherboard from the Gigabyte contest I will be reviewing this card on my tried and true MSI P35 Neo2-FR. I’ve used this board in multiple reviews and it’s consistently performed under the most extreme circumstances. One should note that in a single-card instance that the board chipset doesn’t matter, only with Crossfire would you need a 975x or X38/X48 motherboard to wrangle the most performance from your cards.

• Processor: Intel QX9650 3.0GHz 12MB L2 at 4.0GHz
• Motherboard: MSI P35 Neo2-FR
• Memory: Buffalo 2×1GB PC2-8000 Firestix
• Powersupply: OCZ 700w GameXStream
• Harddrive: 1x Seagate 7200.10 300GB
• Operating System: Windows XP SP3

Benchmarks

I’ll be doing my typical suite of benchmarks today by covering Futuremark’s 3DMark 2001/2003/2005/2006 and Massive Development’s Aquamark 3. In addition to these standard tests I’ll also throw in a few quick runs of Crytek’s Crysis in hopes of showing how this GPU can handle the worlds most strenuous game. The 3D benchmarks will be run at their default settings while Crysis will be benchmarks at 800×600, 1280×1024, and 1650×1080 with maximum details and varying levels of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

Overclocking

While not all consumers overclock, it is an important theme on this website so naturally these cards will get a healthy bit of overclocking attention. The GPU is fed 1.240v at stock speeds and there are BIOS modifications that can bump this up to 1.290v which should enable some modest overclocking headroom. The single-slot cooler won’t give the best thermal performance but it should be satisfactory for most overclocked applications.

Results: 3DMark and Aquamark

For a $180 card I was rather impressed with the performance. The 3D2001 results needed a faster CPU to really open up but the 3D2005 and 3D2006 results were top-notch, especially once overclocked. Remember these tests are done at 1024×768 and 1280×1024 resolutions so you wide-screen gamers should take them with a grain of salt.

Results: Crysis

With 512MB of GDDR3 this card scales rather well in Crysis compared to the 256MB HD3850 and 8800GT. The GPU still doesn’t have enough grunt to max out Crysis, I don’t think two of them would be capable of doing this, but there was enough processing power to play what is a very beautiful game at 1680×1050 with the textures and shadows cranked.

Results: Overclocking

In theory the cores that are put into the HD3850 are cores that don’t qualify for the HD3870. The cores are strenuously tested for thermal and frequency issues and this should mean that the HD3850 cores run warmer and require more volts than the HD3870 cores while at similar frequencies. I don’t have an HD3870 to compare with but I can already tell it’s going to take a healthy dosage of volts to hit the magical 1GHz with these cores but for more tame overclocks they scale very well. With the default 1.24v the card surpassed HD3870 core frequencies and with the 1.29v via BIOS it churned out a few more clocks. Later I will detail voltage modifications for those that like to live life on the edge. Given enough voltage and cooling these cards can compete with the big boys at the top.

Results: Thermals and Power Consumption

A single-slot cooler isn’t going to have the best of temperatures no matter how small they shrink this complex core. At stock I had slight concerns over how hot the card ran so while overclocking I engaged leaf blower mode on the card’s fan to keep temperatures in check. I have listed the total system power measured from the wall with and without the HD3850. The load values correlate to 1 core on the processor loaded and the GPU at 100% load while the idle values are with the processor idle at 4GHz without EIST enabled.

Conclusion

The HD3850 does a very good job at bringing high performance to the table for under $200. Given that it’s core is identical to the HD3870, the HD3850 reminds me of the 7900GTO of the last generation. Sure it isn’t nearly as fast with stock speeds but given a few minutes and you easily have something that surpasses it’s siblings. Even at stock speeds and settings the HD3850 offers a great bargain that should be at the top of your list if you have a budget within $40 of it’s price-tag. I must insist though that if you do purchase an HD3850, that you purchase the 512MB version unless you only game at 1280×1024. It has been shown time and time again that 256MB of ram simply isn’t enough to game at 1680×1050 especially with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

Pros

• Great Price/Performance
• Large Overclocking Headroom
• Relatively Low Power Consumption

Cons

• Runs Uncomfortably Hot

Final Score: 9/10