Santa must have had some renovations done to his workshop, in order to accommodate all of the new video cards that came out over the last two months. It all started around Halloween, which had a little extra bang to it this year, with the release of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT. While that card might of attracted the lion's share of the spotlight, AMD released its response, its own killer card around the mid $200 dollar price point, about two weeks later namely the Radeon HD 3870. Today we are going to look at a factory overclocked Radeon HD 3870 from ASUS, the so called Extreme AH3870 TOP version which should offer some extra great gaming performance and pleasure. - NeoSeeker

ASUS Extreme AH3870 512MB TOP Graphics Review

The ASUS Extreme AH3870 is more on the hefty side of cards, than the slight. It was a double slot cooler and feels a lot heavier than you'd guess it would, judging from looks. Which much thicker than its nemesis, the GeForce 8800 GT, the Radeon HD 3870 is about the same length. You can see some resemblance between the Radeon HD 3870 and the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but not that much. In a way, the Radeon HD 3870 looks like a Radeon HD 2900 XT but then a rather lite version. As for the cooler, through the red plastic, you can see a solid block of aluminum fins mounted to the centre of the board.

This stretch of GPU cooling heat fins are all aligned so that air is expediently pushed through, flowing over the card and out the rear. While the ASUS Extreme AH3870 heatsink doesn't have nearly as much metal as a Radeon HD 2900 XT, or say the GeForce 8800 GTS does, the amount it does have does look substantial enough to provide adequate cooling. Unlike some Radeon HD 3850 cards that we have seen, this Radeon HD 3870 also has aluminum heatsinks on the memory. A standard sized fan dominates the right side of the PCB, ready for cooling the heatsink and getting air flowing off of the memory as well.

The Radeon HD 3870 has 320 stream processors, same amount as the Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card. Being an TOP edition, ASUS has overclocked this video card. The GPU clock is set to 850MHz, while the 512MB of GDDR4 memory is clocked to 2286MHz. Unlike the Radeon HD 2900 XT, the Radeon HD 3870 has a 256-bit memory interface. Well, a 256-bit memory bus was sufficient to allow for some great performance from the GeForce 8800 GT cards, so, hopefully this will hold true for the Radeon HD 3870 as well. On the back end of the card we have the standard double DVI outputs.

If the GeForce 8800 GT did not exist, then the Radeon HD 3870 would be rocking every PC gamer's universe. For around $250, you can get the power previously reserved for video cards in the over $400 range, not that long ago. For $250, the Radeon HD 3870 delivers the performance that generally bests the Radeon HD 2900 XT, and is comparable to the GeForce 8800 GTX. Not that bad at all. The ASUS Extreme AH3870 TOP can deliver a solid gaming experience, for a fair price. But it's not all roses, because this card's primary competition, the GeForce 8800 GT and herein lies the problem for the Radeon HD 3870.

While the Radeon HD 3870 did shine in a few of the benchmarks, such as Call of Juarez, both of our GeForce 8800 GT's tested seemed to just out edge the Radeon HD 3870, most of the time. At maximum resolutions with anti-aliasing, often both GeForce 8800 GT cards we tested would have some frame rates advantage over the ASUS Extreme AH3870 TOP edition. And when two cards are priced fairly similarly, this difference can make or break a choice between two closely matched cards. There has been all sorts of stock and price fluctuations recently, for video cards.

Whether to go with an ASUS Extreme AH3870 TOP might come down to what is available where, and at what price. With a great bundle including an excellent game, the Extreme HD 3870 TOP would have looked great under any Christmas tree last week. However, whether to go with this video card over another, for many, will probably be down to what price is offered, on any given day.