After looking at the new GeForce 9600 GT just the other day, it became clear to us that the Radeon HD 3870 really does still have some life in it. It's not dying off anytime soon thanks to the aggressive pricing that has been implemented recently. What we found was that the Radeon HD 3870 stock clocked card faired quite well against the GeForce 9600 GT which came with an increased core and memory clock. It did get us thinking though with an MSI Radeon HD 3870 OC edition sitting around doing nothing, it was time to see what would happen when we put overclocked part up against overclocked part. It's coming down to how well the Radeon HD 3870 is using the higher clock speeds. - TweakTown

MSI Radeon HD 3870 512MB OverClock Board Review

MSI have a very nice package at the moment, everything is very clear and gives us a good idea of what we're getting. The right of the card clearly shows the brand while the bottom shows the model. Just above the model is a sticker that makes note of this card being an OC Edition model. The right of the card goes into some more details and lets us know about some of the main features including 512MB of GDDR4 memory, dual link DVI and PCI Express. Turning the box over we go into more details on the card along with some of the other features. The back is more of the same with extended information on the product.

The card looks great, we see a fair amount of graphics cards come in and out of our labs, but the brightness of the sticker made the card really stand out. It seems kind of weird to like an otherwise somewhat standard cooler so much, but kudos to MSI as they did a good job of making it catch one's eye. Of course, apart from the cooler there really isn't much else to the front of the card due to it taking up pretty much the whole front. Looking around the card there isn't anything out of the ordinary, we have a single PCI Express power connector and across the top we have two CrossFire connectors.

As we've mentioned before, this particular card comes pre-overclocked out of the box. The standard core and memory on the Radeon HD 3870 card comes in at 777/2250MHz, while the MSI version is clocked at 800MHz core though sharing the same 2250MHz memory clock speed. The Radeon HD 3870 has clearly still got some breath in it. The price drops take it to a different level from the GeForce 8800 GT along with the ability to get good performance out of them. When you even out the playing field with the overclocked GeForce 9600 GT, it becomes a little clearer with the Radeon HD 3870 really being able to come out ahead.

Ultimately though, the biggest advantage that the Radeon HD 3870 has is that anyone who is after a good motherboard is going down the route of Intel, in which case you'll most likely find yourself with a CrossFire compatible chipset. With the price of the Radeon HD 3870 moving nothing but south at the moment, the ability to get into CrossFire and see some extra performance can be done at a pretty good price now. MSI have done a good job with the Radeon HD 3870, a nice little overclock helps give it a decent boost, whilst also helping to outperform the brand new GeForce 9600 GT in some situations.