Recently AMD released their new RV670 GPU which is used on their Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 cards. We recently checked out an overclocked card from GeCube, today we have PowerColor's go at making a card that outperforms the reference design. The RV670 GPU is based on the RV630 architecture, but features much better performance. It is built on a 55nm process with 666 million transistors with a 256-bit memory interface. The engineers at PowerColor have redesigned parts of the PCB to fit their requirements, but the basic design circuit design remained the same. What is more important is that the memory size has been doubled instead of 256MB on the reference design. - techPowerUp!

PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme Version Review

Also the clock speeds have received a nice upgrade, they are at 720MHz core and 1800MHz memory now. Instead of the one slot reference cooler a two slot design by ZEROtherm has been chosen as well. Another special feature is that the second DVI port as been replaced by a HDMI port making this card an excellent choice for media PC systems. The PowerColor box is designed vertical which means it will stand out in a shelf of video cards. The back features product specifications in several languages. The first item is CrossFireX which is triple and quad CrossFire, but available only as of next year.

Also the actual overclocked frequencies are not stated on the package. The Xtreme sticker also seems to be very small to us, someone will definitely not notice it when looking the first time. As mentioned before the cooler is made by ZEROtherm. One drawback of this type of fan is that the hot air is not exhausted from the case but circulated inside. Unlike the regular Radeon HD 3850, PowerColor has designed their card with a two slot cooler. This should yield lower temperatures and more overclocking potential. We really like the output configuration that PowerColor is using, one DVI port and one HDMI port.

The cooler uses an array of copper fins attached to a circular heatpipe that goes around the core. The base plate is made from copper as well and polished to a mirror finish. A second heatsink is located near the back of the card. It is simply a chunk of metal which cools the voltage regulation circuitry. You can use this card in CrossFire with any other Radeon HD 3850. If you use reference design cards, both cards will clock down to the lowest clock speed and adjust their framebuffer sizes to match each other. This means that your card will disable 256MB of video memory if you pair it with a Radeon HD 3850 256MB version.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme comes at a great price with $199. For $20 over the reference design price you get an extra 256MB of GDDR3 memory, higher clocks and a better cooler. So PowerColor's Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme is a good step forward in the right direction. The new card cost less, uses less power but still has performance which is often close to the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Doubling the memory size to 512MB of GDDR3 was a wise decision to improve performance. The higher your resolution is, the more benefit you will see from the added video memory.

PowerColor's Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme is special compared to the other cards out there because it has a dedicated HDMI port on the board which makes this card a great choice for home theatre PC systems, if you have the space for the dual slot cooling design. A minor issue is that the cooler does not exhaust the hot air outside of the case, but since the total power draw is very low this is not too much of a concern.