Not to long ago Sapphire introduced their newest cards, the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 series. Today we are going to take a look at the Radeon HD 3870 version. Several games have been recently released and/or are about to be released that will bring any video card not ready for the challenge to its knees. The Radeon HD 3870 offers several great features such as 512MB of GDDR4 memory, HDMI support, DirectX 10.1 technology, great HD support and CrossFireX support to name a few. These all new Radeon HD 3800 series are designed for the mid-range market, feature an all new RV670 chip and should be available at a very attractive price. - Modders-Inc

Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 512MB Video Card Review

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 comes very well placed in a graphical display box that shows a female character. The front and rear of the box shows off the features and highlights that the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 has to offer. Upon opening the box, the user is greeted with a sticker on the anti-static bag stating that the card does require a power connection from the power supply. We wonder if a lot of users have returned cards in the past because they failed to connect their video card to the power supply? We could see it happening for someone that doesn't stay up on the current hardware.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 comes in the transparent red coloring with a red PC board. The heatsinks used on the Radeon HD 3870 are copper and have a fairly nice polish on them for appearance. This a dual slot card and does utilize a fairly large cooling fan to give optimized cooling. Looking at the mounting end of the card we can see the exhaust areas of the card. The transparent red cover has vents at the top, bottom, and rear. This design does generate quite a bit of heat off the tail end of the card that does not get exhausted out of the case. This great cooling will surely help in CrossFire configurations.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 utilizes the new ATI RV670 55nm GPU and does use slightly less power compared to it's closest competitors. For single card installations, Sapphire recommends the use of a 450W power supply that has one PCI Express connector. For CrossFireX configurations they recommend a 550W power supply or greater with two PCI Express connectors. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 is currently going for about $250 on Newegg, which puts it right inline with the lower end GeForce 8800 series cards. This is about the ideal spot for the pricing seeing that the card performs at about the same level.

We were actually concerned that the GeForce 8800 GTS would not keep up with the Radeon HD 3870 before starting this article. After doing the testing we are rather pleased that the two cards performed as close to each other. The Radeon HD 3870 does an excellent job for its price range and brings several great features to the table with it. The fact that it is PCI Express 2.0, supports DirectX 10.1 and has integrated HDMI and HDCP support for Blu-ray and HD DVD support are all great benefits. The Radeon HD 3870 does have one slight annoyance that might bother some, which is all about the noise.