Christmas is just a short time away, what does this mean in the computer enthusiasts world? This means that there will be more and more games released that will demand a video card that can handle all of the intense graphics that will be thrown at it. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850, a card that was just released, is one card that may be able to handle it, with all of the new features that have been thrown together. When the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 was released, it did not come to the table all by itself, Sapphire released its big brother at the same time, the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870. Now the main question that you all be raising, should we put this on our Chrismas shoping list? - Overclockers Club

Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 512MB Video Card Review

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 card comes packaged in a great looking case with an attractive computer generated woman on the front. Not only will this woman grab your attention, the list of some of the features this card has on the front will grab your attention and make you anxious to open the package up. On the reverse side of the box, you will be able to read a few words about the technology of the card and the improvements. The Radeon HD 3850 card has ATI's CrossFireX technology and also will support PCI Express 2.0. The fan on this card was surprisingly quiet as we could not hear it over any of my other fans.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 is a great looking card that ended up being able to kick some butt for an amazingly small price tag. It was able to stand up to some of the current leaders in the graphics card scene and hold its own. This was proven in 3DMark06 when the Radeon HD 3850 beat the GeForce 8800 GTS in the benchmarks. Not only during benchmarks was it able to hold its own, but in real world testing, it was able to prove itself against the GeFreoce 8800 GTS in BioShock, where the Radeon HD 3850 fell short by just a few frame rates, which was very surprising.

The cooling option that Sapphire ended up using on this card was a decent choice because it did not take up a lot of room in the case. Not only did the fan look good, it was very quiet. We were very impressed by the results of this card because of the it's price tag, features and the scores it put out. All of these things make us give it a thumbs up. Sapphire has sold us on this video card, we were so impressed with how it ran and how well it did against all of the other video cards that it will be replacing our current video card in our system.