It's been a while since we've seen something from Sapphire but it was bound to happen sooner or later with the release of the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870. The thing is though, you don't want to look at boring cards with stock cooling or just stock clocks. That's not exciting at all, you want to see big overclocks or fancy heatsinks on your graphics cards so we waited and waited until a press release was sent out from Sapphire mentioning the release of the new Radeon HD 3850 Ultimate graphics card. We like the word Ultimate, it sounds powerful so we were intrigued and thought it was time to get something new and exciting from Sapphire. - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 Ultimate CrossFire Review

The front of Sapphire boxes haven't changed much recently with a more square shape and a pretty plain but informative front. We can see we have a woman on the front of the box holding a sword, and then of course we have the normal line-up of information. The top left corner shows the brand while the very top shows the model along with mention of the world Ultimate. We then have some of the main features like 512MB of GDDR3 memory, HDMI, HD Audio, PCI Express 2.0 along with the inclusion of some of the goodies like 3DMark06, PowerDVD and The Black Box from Valve, and also with CrossFire support.

Moving onto the card itself, the front looks a bit weird with a large plate covering most of the front and three little pipes heading out the top and going around the back. To the right of the card you can also see a heatsink covering some of the hotter components on the card. The heatpipes head out from where the core is and split off into a giant area on the back of the card. Follow those heatpipes and you ultimately end up looking at what is essentially a giant heatsink that helps dissipate the heat the core generates. The cooler generally feels of pretty good quality and is one of the better heatsink only jobs we have seen in a while.

If you do the normal run around the card it's a pretty standard Radeon HD 3850 setup, we have a single PCI Express power connector at the back of the card while across the top we have the CrossFire connectors if you feel like running two of the cards. As for the specifications of the card, while Ultimate might be in the name it really only refers to the huge heatsink that we have on the card since it carries the default clocks of 668MHz on the core and 1656MHz effective on the 512MB of GDDR3 memory. While the card is of course capable of PCI Express 2.0 it has full backwards compatible.

Sapphire has done a good job with the Radeon HD 3850 and it clearly is deserving of the Ultimate name that it carries. The overclocked offering does give it a boost in performance at some stages, and not so much at others. There's no doubt that there are a number of people who would prefer to have a completely silent card and sacrifice a few frames over having something with a fan. The Radeon HD 3850 isn't a bad card as it stands. When you throw Sapphire's version into the mix it becomes a little bit better. There's no doubt that it's one of the faster silent cards, if you don't want noise there isn't many more options.

Clearly the card gets a bit toasty, but you have to remember that we run it in an open environment without any form of fans or airflow blowing directly over the components so this does tend to heat it up a bit more. It will be interesting to see if Sapphire are able to do something with the more powerful Radeon HD 3870 in the new year, but for now if you're looking for an excellent performing graphics card with a silent cooling solution it's definitely worth checking out the Ultimate offering from Sapphire.