The last few weeks have been a particularly busy time in the technology industry, with the introduction of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT, Intel's first 45nm processor and now the announcement of AMD's Spider platform. The platform, which AMD touts as the first of its kind, is comprised of the long awaited quad-core Phenom processors, the AMD 790FX chipset and of course, lets not forget, the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series graphics cards that launched just a couple of weeks ago. There's a reason for this rush to get hardware onto the market though, it's because the latest crop of games are shaping up to be pretty good. And with Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 all turns around speedy hardware. - Bit-Tech

AMD Radeon HD 3870 512MB CrossFire Card Review

The first thing you're going to ask me is why there isn't any nomenclature after the product name? After all, it's something we've become accustomed to over the last few years and we've made fun of the alphabet soup we're usually presented with. In the six months between the launch of the R600 and its replacement, the RV670 chip that is at the heart of these two products, AMD's marketing department appears to have finally seen some sense by changing the way that products within the same family differentiate themselves from one another. There's no longer a string of meaningless letters after the product family.

The Radeon HD 3870 employs a dual slot cooling solution which AMD rates at 34dBA. The design is similar to the reference cooler on the Radeon X1950 XTX, a cooler that we really liked, and we have to say that this one is every bit as good, if not better. It's also much better than the one on the Radeon HD 2900 XT, as this cooler doesn't spin up during gaming like the Radeon HD 2900 XT's did. In fact, the cooling solution remained quiet during all of our testing, even with a pair of the cards running side by side in CrossFire. We guess that's not really down to the Radeon HD 2900 XT's cooling solution though.

The Radeon HD 3870's PCB is a few centimetres shorter than the Radeon HD 2900 XT board. Most of the saved space is because of RV670's reduced power requirements and they're quite visible if you look at the card itself. Because of the more efficient GPU, AMD quotes the card's worst case thermal design power as 105W. One of the items you might have seen on the card's feature list is PCI Express 2.0 support. There is 512MB high-speed GDDR4 memory rated to 2.4GHz effective clock speed. AMD has said that if partners see the benefit, they can opt for different memory capacities.

If we take in everything we've covered so far, we think it's fair to say that the Radeon HD 3870 is a successful refresh of a product that was plagued with so many problems. We don't think we need to go on about the problems that there were with the R600 and the Radeon HD 2900 XT, there's a new product in town that's so many times better than the Radeon HD 2900 XT that we can't begin to describe it. That's not to say that RV670 is without its problems, but a lot of the major ones have been worked out. Regardless, we were pleased to hear that the R700 won't suffer from the same problems.

AMD's Radeon HD 3870 is a great product for the money, but its price point is incredibly important to its long term success. We say this because unfortunately for AMD, there’s a certain G92 based graphics card from NVIDIA which delivers, in some cases, quite a bit more performance for not much more financial outlay. With that said though, if you're an ATI fan or are on a budget, the Radeon HD 3870 is by no means a dud, this and the Radeon HD 2900 XT are like night and day. It's a great time to be in the market for a new graphics card, because there are treats on both sides of the fence.