Now let's face it, 2007 was full of drama for AMD. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong except the Radeon HD 3800 series. NVIDIA fails to deliver good price and/or performance cards at that $200 price segment and when ATI released the Radeon HD 3800 series the dynamics changed. As we speak NVIDIA is still trying to prepare a card to match this series but until released the Radeon HD 3800 series offer a stack load of performance, compatibility and features at a terrific price. Shortly after the release of the reference cards, HIS adapted another line of these cards as well. In their very successful product line they always release their IceQ version of their graphics cards. - Guru3D

HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ3 TurboX Graphics Review

Todays product is hot, but in a good way. It's a Radeon HD 3850 colored with a blue PCB, an IceQ3 cooler slapped on top of it and they pre-overclocked it to match the Radeon HD 3870 performance level, all that for roughly $250. The PCB differs and the color is now blue. On top of the card we see a huge dual slot cooling unit. But even so important, we notice that the core and memory clocks run higher than reference. We see a core frequency of 735MHz and the memory clocked at 1960MHz. That's actually slightly slower than a Radeon HD 3870. To cut costs the card is back to GDDR3 memory at a 256-bit memory bus.

Well, a HIS product is always enjoyable to check out. We do admit though that over the past year their software bundle got more sober. The Valve coupon hardly shows any real value and other than that you only receive the driver CD. This is a bit of a trend among manufacturers though. But that's the only negative though. Because other than that there are only positives to report. The card just looks stunning, feels stunning and performs stunningly. Now surely as the results clearly show it's not a GeForce 8800 GT killer which in the end thus is the better graphics card, athough the availability is not as it should.

Especially this HIS edition once again is doing very nice things. The design, cooling and close to Radeon HD 3870 performance make it bring a smile to our faces. When you go for a card like this then please do opt for the 512MB version. In the higher resolutions and DirectX 10 games with massive textures the extra 512MB can make a difference for sure. In fact for DirectX 10 gaming we recommend 512MB or higher graphics adapters these days, but granted current generation graphics cards for both NVIDIA and ATI hardly can cope with DirectX 10 anyway. Your gaming experience will be great with excellent image quality.

So in closing for the HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ3 TurboX in general, the card offers fantastic gaming performance and features for the money, but let's not forget we have the new UVD engine on-board and what about that massively improved power consumption. We have a standard decent overclock, and you can get several of them working together in CrossFireX mode. So you tell us, what is there not to like about the Radeon HD 3850 in this price range? HIS pioneered the special edition cards with custom cooling, and you know what we still adore them for doing so and giving us all a very nice product.