The graphics card market continues to become more splintered and specialized as time goes by. So ATI and NVIDIA are both working overtime to find a specific market niche that the other is not servicing as such, which has led to many very interesting product releases. The Radeon HD 3800 series is just one, and these cards are targeted at just above and below the magic $200 mainstream ceiling. The Radeon HD 3850 is the little brother of the two, and in addition to being a price to performance champion, its lower power and heat production has led to Sapphire offering another of their innovative Ultimate edition models. This should however come in handy for home theatre PC's. - Sharky Extreme

Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 Ultimate Graphics Preview

AMD has experienced some problems lately, but the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series has been an unexpected surprise, and a hot seller. The Radeon HD 3850 GPU has 666 million transistors and is built using a 55nm process. It features a unified shader architecture with 320 stream processors, 16 texture units and 16 raster operation units, and utilizes a 256-bit bus to either GDDR3 or GDDR4 memory. Default clock speeds are 668MHz for the core and 1656MHz for the memory. The card can support either 256MB or 512MB of onboard memory and supports DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, PowerPlay and CrossFireX technology.

Sapphire is well known for its heatpipe video card designs, which utilize a fanless cooling design, and sport the Ultimate edition brand. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ultimate follows right along with prior efforts, and includes a large heatpipe with heatsink cooling design, with three heatpipes linking to the top of the card, and then traveling to a substantial heatsink on the back of the card. This type of design offers a silent running, lower power variant of a standard Radeon HD 3850 card, but there are some concessions. One is the size of the card, and the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 Ultimate is a very big boy.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ultimate may be a fanless video card, but it still offers full overclocking support through the Overdrive feature. The default clocks were measured by Overdrive at standard 669MHz core and 1658MHz memory speeds. Using Overdrive's automatic tuning mechanism resulted in a top overclock of 705MHz core and 1878MHz memory, which represents a nice increase over the default clock speeds. Not insignificant, especially for a fanless card, but as always, we're looking to manually squeeze every possible extra out of the hardware. Although we couldn't increase it much further.

Sapphire has done an excellent job with their Radeon HD 3850 Ultimate edition card, providing interested buyers with a way of achieving a low noise, power saving design, and without losing anything on the performance end. Gaming speed is excellent for a mainstream card, and it competes extremely well against its peers and even gives some high-end cards trouble. There are some potential issues, like the sheer size of the card and its slightly higher price compared to the standard design, but those in the market for this type of graphics card should be very impressed with Sapphire's effort.