Factory overclocked graphics cards are something that we take for granted these days on the NVIDIA side of the fence, such that we are usually inundated with a selection of cards from different partners with often vastly different clock speeds. This is good in many ways, because it allows each partner to carve out a niche within their market. However, it can often lead to some quite fierce competition between some of the top partners. This goes right to the extreme where some partners will spend more time down playing other manufacturer's products than they spend marketing their own. By comparison, this whole pre-overclocked malarkey is fairly new to the ATI side of the fence. - Bit-Tech

ASUS Extreme AH3870 TOP Edition Graphics Review

Today we're looking at one of the company's newest additions to this series, the Extreme AH3870 TOP version. And, given the product's name, it will come as no surprise to you for us to say that it is based on AMD's current flagship part, the ATI Radeon HD 3870. What's interesting here is that, although ASUS is really pushing the fact it has bundled Company of Heroes with the Extreme AH3870 TOP, it isn't making as much noise about how high it has clocked this card out of the box. Given that there's a 75MHz core speed increase, we'd expect ASUS to have made a little more noise than the relatively small TOP logo on the box.

Like the box, ASUS has given the Extreme AH3870 TOP graphics card the Company of Heroes treatment, with the sticker covering the plastic heatsink shroud adorning the game's two main characters. Despite this though, the card looks just like any other Radeon HD 3870 graphics card. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, because we've been really impressed with the Radeon HD 3870's reference cooler. ASUS has said that later down the line it does plan to replace the cooling solution on this card, but we haven't heard when this is going to happen and, more importantly, how the new cooler will perform.

ASUS has impressively overclocked the core to 851MHz, which is 76MHz higher than the reference clock and should roughly equate to a ten percent performance increase in GPU limited scenarios. Meanwhile, the memory has been increased by a much more conservative 30MHz effective and we find this a little strange, as the memory used on the card is rated up to 2.4GHz. Of course, RV670 also features the audio controller that allows you to pass audio through the DVI connectors once the DVI to HDMI converter is connected, making it an ideal companion for a home theatre PC that might be used for a touch of gaming.

This is the closest that an ATI based graphics card has got to competing with NVIDIA at the same price point for some time now, but there are still cases where even this factory overclocked Radeon HD 3870 from ASUS disappoints us a bit. It pains us to say that because the Radeon HD 3870 is a truly fantastic product that we are big fans of. The penalty for enabling anti-aliasing is the single most disappointing downside compared to what else is on the market at the same price. We're now in 2008 and one would hope that a performance mainstream video card is able to cope with anti-aliasing enabled in most games.

Of course, Crysis is an exception to this rule, but there are still times where the performance drop is much larger than what we're used to seeing on ATI based graphics cards of days gone by. On the whole though, the card looks to be a great choice as long as ASUS meets its suggested retail price. However, our suggestion would be to look at one of the cheaper Radeon HD 3870's on the market, pocket the difference and then dabble in a bit of overclocking. We say this because although the ASUS Extreme AH3870 TOP gets close to a similarly priced GeForce 8800 GT, it never really matches it in every scenario.