ATI enters a new era of performance with the arrival of the Radeon HD 3800 series. The two released products, the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870, are both based on a new GPU, the RV670. There have been several major changes in the architecture of the hardware compared with the previous R600, of the Radeon HD 2900 XT series. What AMD is proud of, is that the RV670 is fabricated on a 55nm TSMC process. That should give an advantage in die size, cost and hopefully clock speeds and power consumption. Other improvements are the newly PCI Express 2.0 and DirectX 10.1 extensions support. AMD has supported video playback performance with an Unified Video Decoder. - CDRInfo

Club3D Radeon HD 3850 256MB Version Card Review

The Club3D Radeon HD 3800 series delivers a new experience of HD with your workstation or entertainment PC. Enjoy your games with incredible performance and the best image quality achievable. Be prepared for upcoming games with DirectX 10.1 delivering stunning 3D graphics and shading effects. Use the new PCI Express 2.0 for faster throughput and thanks to ATI CrossFireX for the easy plug and play upgradability. The Unified Video Decoder offers smooth playback with your Blu-ray and HD DVD movies at full 1080p without taxing your CPU, getting the ultimate in image quality and watch your content with HD resolutions.

The new Radeon HD 3800 series gives ATI and AMD a new performance boost compared with the previous Radeon HD 2900 XT series. Many users complained that the previous Radeon HD 2600 and Radeon HD 2900 series didn't exactly offer any real performance boost, but was more a re-polished product that couldn't really compare with the NVIDIA lineup. Things have changed and the new Radeon HD 3800 series seems to give ATI a product to be proud of. While we didn't check out the Radeon HD 3870, we are happy that the Radeon HD 3850 series can easily surpass even the fastest GeForce 8600 GTS cards.

Depending on the game and anti-aliasing settings, users can experience really high frame rates. The retail package for the Club3D Radeon HD 3850 doesn't include any retail games, but that keeps the overall package cost low, something that most ATI partners are looking for. We think the retail price of the Radeon HD 3850 cards, indicates that these are really worth a look. So, if you are looking to upgrade your graphics system, the Club3D Radeon HD 3850 will cover most of your needs, from high frames gaming, to high definition playback content and the most important, will save you money to boot.