Today we are going to look at the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme graphics card. This graphics card is aimed at the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS for those looking for a matchup. This is one of the few ATI cards that you will see that comes factory overclocked as well. So when looking at the Radeon HD 3800 series we have to state that these are following the same logic as for the Radeon HD 2900 XT although being slightly optimized. This means that ATI came up with a revised RV670 core that will power the Radeon HD 3800 series and comes in two variations. The faster part is the Radeon HD 3870, but coming with the some graphics core as the Radeon HD 3850 version. - I4U News

PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme Cooling Review

The PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme has a core clock of 720MHz and a memory clock of 1800MHz effective. The card uses 512MB of GDDR3 memory and has a 256-bit memory interface, supporting DirectX 10.1 technology. This is actually a change from the previous Radeon HD 2900 series, which just came with the DirectX 10 function. In fact the RV670 chip powering the Radeon HD 3800 series is the first chip that catered for the newest DirectX 10.1 logic but still using 320 stream processors. On top of that PowerColor applied a better cooling solution which allowed them to run their version at higher clock speeds.

This card has very good performance considering the price in the $200 range. It's been a while since we have been reasonably impressed by the performance of an ATI card. It's good to see ATI with something that can compete with NVIDIA and the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme does a good job competing with the cards from big green in its price class. The performance of the card is very good and PowerColor squeezes even more performance form the card with factory overclocking.