When the Radeon HD 2900 XT card was released mid-last year after numerous delays it unfortunately wasn't quite what the hardware community was looking for both under performing NVIDIA's high-end GeForce 8 cards and yet drawing more power than them. ATI's start into DirectX 10 graphics was not a good one and this was not a good sign for AMD who not long ago dropped billions of dollars to pick up the graphics company. After NVIDIA refreshed their core with the 65nm G92 chip, ATI did the same for the R600 which has addressed almost all of the problems of the old cards and brought hefty competition back into the market. Today we have one of these cards to look at from VisionTek. - AMDZone

VisionTek Radeon HD 3870 CrossFireX Board Review

As NVIDIA did with the G92 core, ATI have shrunk the die size considerably even lower than NVIDIA with the new RV670 made at a 55nm manufacturing process which alone solves many of the issues of the Radeon HD 2900 XT cards. The first is of course power consumption is reduced significantly, another by product of which is much less heat for increasing core speeds, and last a smaller die means cheaper overall manufacturing costs. One area where the R600 had what was a good number in technical specs but probably hurt more than it helped was the very high memory bandwidth numbers.

These have been halved with the RV670 with the internal ring bus down to 512-bit and the external bandwidth down to 256-bit, which also allowed for a reduction in transistors. The number of stream processors, the new answer to pixel and vertex shaders, holds steady at 320 shaders with 16 texture units and 16 render backends. As you might expect with a die shrink the core speed has also increased by 35MHz to 775MHz though you will see some overclocked parts out there. The memory speeds see a much larger bump up to 2.25GHz effective over 1.65GHz of the Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card.

One new feature which it also boasts over the R600 is support for PCI Express 2.0 which is now featured in AMD's 790FX chipset and will be in NVIDIA's new nForce 700 series as well as Intel's newer chipsets. No major benefits from it yet so you'll be fine with the current PCI Express. Other new features for ATI's Radeon HD 3800 series includes DirectX 10.1. While it's unlikely we'll see any DirectX 10.1 games for sometime and definitely it won't be a requirement for even longer it is nice to see again an update in the specifications. And ATI also brought mobile power saving features into the desktop world with PowerPlay.

Overall we have to say that we're very impressed with the RV670 and VisionTek's Radeon HD 3870 video card. Finally ATI have come back hard against NVIDIA and while they can't beat them at the very top they can more than compete with them in regards to price and performance. And a Radeon HD 3870 should almost match a GeForce 8800 GT. The VisionTek Radeon HD 3870 512MB is available for around the price of $249 at most stores though you can find it for $245 through some price search engines. This puts it at about $20 cheaper than the cheapest GeForce 8800 GT 512MB card so it is price almost perfect.