Purchasing a new video card is always a game of compromises. You usually start to compromise on performance when the dollar signs for the best of the best video cards start ramping up to those of your car payment or mortgage. Somewhere there has to be a price to performance line that is equitable to both your pocket book and your gaming experience. what if there was an option for a great gaming experience at a nice price tag? ATI and their partners have just released the latest in the Radeon HD 3800 series of video cards with the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 video cards. The Diamond Viper HD 3850 video card is one of these just introduced video cards. - Overclockers Club

Diamond Viper HD 3850 CrossFireX Graphics Review

First let's talk about some of the features that make the new Radeon HD 3800 series stand out from the crowd. DirectX 10.1 support for HD gaming at its best, Shader Model 4.1 support and support for PCI Express 2.0, plug and play CrossFireX multi-GPU upgradeability, the ability to use four, yes we said four video cards in CrossFire configuration on the new 790FX chipset AMD platform boards, the ability to watch HD or Blu Ray disks in full 1080p without placing most of the decoding burden on the CPU with UVD, and built-in HDMI 5.1 sound. Is the Diamond Viper HD 3850 series more suited for an all gaming rig?

For those who are looking at every watt of electricity they use, the RV670 GPU's are built on a 55 nanometer process. PowerPlay technology is used to reduce the consumption of power when the graphics are used in a non demanding 2D environment by dropping the core speed of the GPU. With these kind of features, you can't go wrong. The Diamond Viper HD 3850 256MB video cards come in a simple understated package rather than a gaudy box. The front has a picture of Ruby, the ATI icon, on the right hand side of the box, with the specifications and features on the back side. This no nonsense approach is much appreciated.

The Diamond Viper HD 3850 series cards use a single slot cooling solution to keep the card's GPU, memory and power regulation circuits cool. The all copper cooling solution gives the card a weighty feel to it. The heatsink is kept in place by the retaining bracket over the backside of the GPU as well as six more spots on the card. The CrossFire connections are seen at the front of the board. Having two connections available allows for having more than two cards in the CrossFire configuration. In fact, the new CrossFireX technology allows for up to four cards to be used in this configuration.

If this set of cards was run against the mid-ranged cards it is meant to compete against, it would have blown them out of the water. We wanted to test these cards against the higher end hardware to see how well the CrossFire combination performs. Showing a dominating performance is really nice, but that only presents half the story. The fact is that the cards performed above their class level at many times, keeping pace with the heavyweights in the video card world on some of our benchmarks, though not all of them. The CrossFire performance was not as we were expecting on some of the gaming benchmarks.

Overclocking the card through the Catalyst Control Center was a simple affair. By using the included auto tune utility, the clock speeds are slowly ratcheted up to the point the software determines the card is stable. The numbers looked great, but are a little optimistic. Adjusting the clock and memory speeds down, we reached a stable overclocked speed of 740MHz on the core and 1978MHz for the memory. These were substantial increases that did help with performance. At a price of $179 each, Diamond have positioned the Vipder HD 3850 series to compete on both price and performance in the $150-250 price range.

With the migration to the 55 nanometer process, the consumption of power has been reduced. Using PowerPlay technology, the drivers underclock the video card to reduce the power draw when not in a demanding 3D environment. The Radeon HD 3800 series of cards uses a built-in hardware decoder that relieves the CPU of the burden of managing HD-DVD and Blu Ray content. Setting up CrossFire is a matter of just installing the interconnect cables. No fuss no muss. Does this card in CrossFire meet the demands of today's latest games? Sure it does, just not at the maximum settings.