Diamond Multimedia is a new name for us, but they have been around for a long time. Diamond has been trying to get the attention of gamers for some time now, but gamers are a tough group to get the attention of. Diamond released their Radeon HD 3870 and Radeon HD 3850 graphics cards back in November when they originally came out, but they were based off the ATI reference design and were the same as everyone else's. Diamond went back to the drawing board and came up with an Radeon HD 3850 that would be unique to them and be directed at overclockers and enthusiasts. What Diamond came up with was a Radeon HD 3850 512MB dual slot card, with a custom cooling design. - Legit Reviews

Diamond Radeon HD 3850 Ruby Version Card Review

They doubled the on-board GDDR3 memory from 256MB to 512MB, which should significantly help frame buffer performance in gaming, but that isn't all they did. They also tossed the old single slot cooler and went with a larger and improved cooling system that lowered temperatures across the board. To top it all off they designed their own PCB. As you can see, Diamond went back to the drawing board and came up with a video card that should impress most of the ATI fans. It is interesting to note though that Diamond left the clock speeds at default settings even though they call the card overclocked on their website.

The clock speeds are default with the core running 668MHz and the memory clock at 1656MHz. Diamond should say that the card is overclockable and not overclocked. When it comes to power supply requirements keep in mind that you will need a 450W or greater power supply with 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connector as that is the recommended requirements for a single card system. If you want to run CrossFire with two of these cards, then a 550W power supply with two 6-pin connectors is needed. When CrossFireX drivers come out and four cards can be linked together even more power is required.

The custom cooling solution on the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby edition graphics card may not look pretty, but it is quiet and beefy. With the four screws that hold the fan shroud and cover on removed you can get a better look at what they have done. The retail packaging on the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby edition graphics card is nice and simple. Just Ruby and the product title are on the box, which makes it easy to read on store shelves. The back of the retail box talks about the next generation of HD gaming and also about HD entertainment and how the Radeon HD 3850 video card fits the bill.

To overclock the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB video card, we used ATI Overdrive that is part of the Catalyst drivers. When you unlock the ATI Overdrive, you can manually set the clock and memory settings or let the auto tune utility to set the frequencies for you. After ATI Overdrive finished, it showed the clock speeds being 710MHz on the GPU and 1740MHz on the memory. This is a nice jump up from 669/1656MHz, which are the stock settings. Once we started to play games, the system was found to be stable. Not a massive overclock, but it's good enough for a slight performance boost in games.

Diamond Multimedia has done a great job with the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby edition graphics card. It is clear that the additional memory helps out in the games and synthetic benchmarks that we tried it out. The improved dual slot cooling solution doesn't look good, but it does the job and dropped the load temperatures. The only downside to this is that the card now takes up two slots, but for most desktop systems this should not be an issue. Having temperature decreases like that are rare, so kudos to Diamond for stepping up the plate and doing something about the heat.

When it comes to pricing the standard Diamond Radeon HD 3850 256MB video card will set you back $170, which is not bad for a mainstream graphics card that can play all the current game titles with decent quality settings and resolutions. The Ruby edition graphics card costs $190, but there is a $10 rebate on the card for a limited period. This makes the final cost to end up being $180. For just $10 more than the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 256MB you get twice as much memory, better cooling and more gaming performance. Talk about a good bargain, atually it is one killer Radeon HD 3850 series card.