After launching their standard and overclocked lines of the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards, PowerColor announced a Radeon HD 3850 with 1GB of memory. We quickly managed to get our hands on their Radeon HD 3850 1GB version and take it out for a spin. With this card, PowerColor aims at mid-range customers who still want a slightly better card and are willing to spare couple of extra bucks for something exotic. This card features an overclocked GPU running at 720MHz speed and the icing on the cake is the total of 1GB of memory and ZEROtherm's professional cooling system cooler. Somehow a quite special version that would be somehow for a selected group of gamers. - FudZilla

PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 1GB Video Card Review

In spite of the fact that the card is manufactured in 55nm, higher speeds always mean higher temperatures so PowerColor did the right thing and opted for ZEROtherm coolers. The Radeon HD 3850 with 1GB uses only eight Qimonda 1.1ns GDDR3 memory chips and it's one of the first cards that uses only eight chips to get a total of 1GB. Previous 1GB cards had to have sixteen chips in order to brag about the memory quantity. The card's memory kept the reference speed of 1658MHz, but since Qimonda's 1.1ns memory runs at reference 1800MHz we were hoping it would overclock easily due to the memory cooling.

The heatspreader on the memory didn't get hot, not even during overclocking. The Qimonda's 1GB density modules are a perfect fit for the space taken up by 512MB or 256MB density modules so we can soon expect 2GB cards. On the other hand, who needs 2GB of memory on their card anyway? The ZEROtherm cooler does an excellent job in keeping the temperature as low as possibe, and it didn't automatically adjust speed to the temperature so the fan noise was constant and audible. You can mix this or any other Radeon HD 3850 card with a stronger Radeon HD 3870 card and get hybrid CrossFire.

We couldn't resist the temptation to overclock this card's core and memory. We managed to clock the GPU up to 830MHz, which is more than the reference 670MHz on the standard Radeon HD 3850 video cards. We were pleased with the results and the card ran all the 3DMark benchmarks flawlessly. At the same time we clocked the memory from reference 1658MHz all the way up to 2000MHz. We were impressed with the card's stability at these clock speeds. However, problems arose when we moved on to gaming as we had to downclock the card to 796MHz core and 1818MHz memory to achieve stability.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 1GB version is the first Radeon HD 3850 with 1GB of memory that we've tested so far, and currently the only company that offers a similar card is Sapphire. Except for rare games, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator X, you will hardly ever find a game that will find a way to utilize this amount of memory. For those who might need graphics memory for professional use, the Radeon HD 3850 1GB edition has it to spare. We hope that developer teams will soon make owners of 1GB graphics cards happy with new titles that will put the huge memory capacity to good use with extra visual experiences.

The Radeon HD 3850 is a multimedia card, as HDTV and HDMI are their flagship characteristics. We recommend this card to those who know exactly what they need it for, and as for the rest the overclocked Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme from the same company might be the thing you're looking for.