The RV670 was a sign of change at AMD, a change for the better after a slew of delays and problems getting its R600 GPU out of the door. And when ATI did get it out of the door, what followed was a pretty underwhelming product. It therefore came as no surprise that the Radeon HD 2900 XT was discontinued fairly sharply before being replaced by the RV670 based Radeon HD 3870. A card that we found fixed many of the problems with the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but still wasn't quite enough to match NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT. Back in the middle of December, Sapphire announced its new Atomic gaming portal and with it came the Atomic series of graphics cards. - Bit-Tech

Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic Video Card Review

Today we have a look at Sapphire's Radeon HD 3870 Atomic which, as the name might imply, is a pre-overclocked Radeon HD 3870 board but, unlike the ASUS Extreme AH3870 TOP eidtion, it's quite different from the ATI reference card. Will this card come through our battery of tests unscathed, making it a card worth some serious consideration, or will it trip over one of the many hazards in its way? The packaging that most hardware is boxed in these days is typically pretty boring, sometimes tacky science fiction characters plastered on the front of them in the hope to catch the customer's eye in a crowded retail store.

Sadly, most don't succeed and it almost becomes a competition to see which manufacturer can design the most garish looking box. Anyway, Sapphire decided not to go down that route with its Radeon HD 3870 Atomic and instead packed the card inside a branded aluminium suitcase that's filled to the gills with bundled extras. The idea is novel, but we can't help but think what would happen if a not so friendly local police officer felt you looked a little suspicious walking home with a metal briefcase with Atomic on the side. Try explaining that to your friends when you're late home from the local computer hardware store.

Sapphire had a long, hard look at the ATI reference design and decided that it wasn't good enough for where it wanted to go with its Atomic brand. The dual slot cooling solution as the major downside and it was something that the company worked hard to change. The company's engineers went to work and came up with a single slot cooling solution aided by something Sapphire has called vapour chamber technology, a new cooling method that bears some resemblance to traditional heatpipe design. At the very least, it uses the old principle of moving heat away from the source to a much cooler area as quickly as possible.

We overclocked the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic using RivaTuner to increase the clock speeds and Crysis under DirectX 10 mode to test for stability. As a quick reminder, Sapphire's factory overclocked card comes with an 825MHz core clock, while the memory is clocked at 2400MHz effective. After a couple of hours of tweaking and stability testing, we found that we were able to increase the core speed to 875MHz and the memory to 2512MHz effective. Sapphire's Radeon HD 3870 512MB Atomic is a ground breaking product, but sadly where it falls short at the moment is on the performance side of things.

From what we understand, since the launch of the Radeon HD 3870 X2, the RV670 chips are suffering from even higher demand than they were before. This has resulted in the prices of the standard cards increasing slightly, and bringing them more into line with NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT. This is a problem for ATI, because the chip just isn't fast enough, even when it's overclocked like Sapphire's excellent example. The cheapest we've found the card for is $250, which is on the expensive side, but it sounds easier to stomach than the $300 other retailers are expecting customers to pay for this graphics card.

What we can take away from this though is the fact that there has been some true innovation, something that we don't see all that often from add-in board partners. The technology that Sapphire has showcased is nothing short of awesome, it not only looks good but also works incredibly well. What's more impressive though is the fact that Sapphire's card is running at much higher clock speeds than the reference card. We're excited to see what kind of price point it can hit with a card using this cooling technology that isn't only available in limited quantities.