Test Rig Configuration

That's it about the card itself, from a hardware and design point of view. Leaving you all with a first impression of the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme we are going to move to the performance you can expect from this new graphics accelerator. The system used to compile and analyze the gaming performance figures is build around the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo technology, which will provide extensive central processing power supporting the RV670 visual and processing capabilities. We are using our new and high performing system based around the Intel 975X Express chipset powering our mainboard. So, let's go through the system specifications...

• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• Crucial Ballistix 2GB PC2-8000 Dual Channel Memory
• PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 512MB Xtreme Graphics Card
• Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS 640MB Edition Graphics Card
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache Hard Disk
• Speeze RockeTeer 600W (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Cooler Master Stacker 832 (RC-832) Tower Case
• Arctic Cooling MX-2 Performance Thermal Compound
• Dell UltraSharp 30" 3007WFP (Black) LCD Flat Display
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

As you can see we have used the some high performance components, and we would like to thank Crucial, Gainward and PowerColor for their generosity on supplying us with some excellent hardware. The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 975X chipset supporting the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR2 memory. We will be using our modest Core 2 Duo E6700 but running at 2.8GHz to support the high-end graphics cards. So both the mainboard and CPU are fine tuned to support this overclocking, to provide the maximum compatible and stable clock speeds. Throughout the benchmarking and gaming analysis we are using the newest beta Catalyst 7.11 drivers provided by ATI along with the introduction of the Radeon HD 3800 series.

Synthetic Benchmarks

As usual we start of the benchmark analysis by going through the different benchmark suites coming from Futuremark, and normally also AquaMark 3. These will provide a good indication on the game play of today's games. Although with AquaMark 3 we experienced since the Radeon HD 3800 series some issues being that it doesn't show the final score at the end of the benchmark. So, due to that we will only be using the suites from Futuremark starting with 3DMark03, followed by 3DMark05 and last but not least 3DMark06. We will reboot our system each time for each of the four synthetic API's used and leave all processes running in the background. We put the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme accelerator against the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB graphics card provided by Gainward, and doing so analyze the performance figures...

Futuremark 3DMark03

To start the exercise we first go back to actually an older benchmark suite from Futuremark. By combining full DirectX 9.0a support with completely new tests and graphics, 3DMark03 continues the legacy of being the industry standard benchmark. The high quality game tests, image quality tests, sound tests and others give you an extremely accurate overview of your system's current gaming performance. So the synthetic analysis begins by taking a spin with 3DMark03 which is build around the DirectX 9.0 specifications, although still using quite some DirectX 8.1 features. This is actually the first gamers' benchmark that could really be called this name, and actually earned it since it was released.

Benchmark Results - 1280x1024 - E6700 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB	3DMark03 Score
0x AA/Optimal	513/1584MHz (Ref - Single)	24290
4x AA/8x AF	513/1584MHz (Ref - Single)	14641
8x AA/16x AF	513/1584MHz (Ref - Single)	10294
	Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme 512MB	3DMark03 Score
0x AA/Optimal	720/1800MHz (Ref - Single)	27579
4x AA/8x AF	720/1800MHz (Ref - Single)	11784
8x AA/16x AF	720/1800MHz (Ref - Single)	8329
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

Being an already older benchmark, it does still perform quite well to show a first indication on the performance of the graphics accelerator. When looking at the results from the reference Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme we can say that it is fast and does a bit better than the GeForce 8800 GTS. However this is changing a bit when we enabled the fancy features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, as the GeForce 8800 GTS comes out on top. The Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme can somehow keep up the pace, although can't keep up. The new architecture of unified shaders does well even with the older gaming engine, and you can as well enjoy the new visual effects of DirectX 10 in the near future.

Benchmark Results - 1600x1200 - E6700 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB	3DMark03 Score
4x AA/8x AF	513/1584MHz (Ref - Single)	11572
	Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme 512MB	3DMark03 Score
4x AA/8x AF	720/1800MHz (Ref - Single)	9186
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.
Benchmark Results - 2560x1600 - E6700 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB	3DMark03 Score
4x AA/8x AF	513/1584MHz (Ref - Single)	5683
	Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme 512MB	3DMark03 Score
4x AA/8x AF	720/1800MHz (Ref - Single)	5097
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

You got that right, some HD gaming input as well as we are now using one of these lovely widescreen 30" LCD displays that feature an awesome resolution of 2560x1600 to experience just that extra more. And actually ATI has jumped on the High Definition gaming wagon and show that by the new naming convention with the HD abbreviation in their product naming. Again we put both our setups against each other, with once again the PowerColor config taking the lead. In the end it doesn't come that much as a surprise as 3DMark03 is not a full blown DirectX 9.0c benchmark suite, but rather limited to the lower versions. And to that extend the Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme version just has better specifications and raw power to get the job done.