It is a good time to be in the market for a video card, especially if you want to spend around $200. Both ATI's Radeon HD 3870 and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT have been around for a few months now, and prices have reached new lows. Even just six months ago, getting the level of performance that can be had with a Radeon HD 3870 or a GeForce 8800 GT for around $200 would have been hard to believe. And just last week, things got even more interesting with the introduction of NVIDIA's first GeForce 9th series video card, the GeForce 9600 GT edition. Currently selling for around $180, the GeForce 9600 GT graphics card proved to be speedy card, despite having only 64 stream processors. - NeoSeeker

Gigabyte Radeon HD 3870 512MB Video Card Review

While the previous generation of mid-range cards left a bit to be desired when it came to performance , especially in DirectX 10 games but that isn't the case this time around. Today we are looking at Gigabyte's twist on the Radeon HD 3870. This Radeon HD 3870 has a Zalman cooler on it, and Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 2 technology as well, which might help out with overclocking. We are going to check this Radeon HD 3870 against the primary competition around the $200 price point, including the GeForce 8800 GT versions, the GeForce 9600 GT, and not to mention the Radeon HD 3850 as well, to find out which is better.

While we have looked at a number of Radeon HD 3870 cards over the last few months, the good news has been that they have all been unique in their own way. The Gigabyte Radeon HD 3870 continues this trend as well, with the most obvious feature seperating it from the Radeon HD 3870 pack is its unique cooling solution. Gigabyte chose to go with Zalman do design their cooler and that is as such not a bad idea in the contrary. You are probably familiar with Zalman from their famous silent cooling, a company that has become renown for their effective cooler designs, and has been around since the late 20th century.

This time around Zalman has come up with a half circle fin array, composed of aluminum and copper. While it may look a little less serious than some coolers we have seen recently, this Zalman 2-ball bearing cooler proved effective in our testing. The fan ran at a high speed, as well as being fairly quiet. As effective as the Zalman fan is, there are two faults to this cooling situation that are apparent. First off, many people have a preference for hot air being moved out off their case by a cooler and secondly, the fan only blows a bit air over the Gigabyte Radeon HD 3870's memory, and their is no heatsink at all over this important region.

To be honest, my expectations for the overclocking of Gigabyte's Radeon HD 3870 were mixed. My tredipation was well placed, as the GPU overclocked quite well, but the memory didn't achieve the level of overclock we were looking for. Nonetheless, a core speed of 889MHz and a memory clock of 2178MHz isn't that bad at all. This is a very reasonable overclock considering the default clock speed of a Radeon HD 3870 is 775MHz, and 2000MHz for the memory. And with proper cooling, you should not have trouble getting at least 200MHz above the rated memory speeds, simple cause currently these are not cooled.

If we set aside the competition for moment, overall the Gigabyte Radeon HD 3870 is a good card. On the positive side of things, the Zalman cooler is quite nice. Not only did it keep temperatures down for a decent GPU overclock, but it was also very quiet, it was also nice to see was the inclusion of Neverwinter Nights 2 in the Gigabyte Radeon HD 3870's bundle. One thing that did not impress us very much with for this card was the memory. It is one of the very few Radeon HD 3870 cards with GDDR3 memory, and it is clocked by default to less than the reference Radeon HD 3870 clock speeds.

While you could overclock it no problem to the standard speeds if you wished, not everybody is an overclocker, and many consumers probably would not realize their Radeon HD 3870 is a bit slower than the others. If you are an overclocker, the lack of heatsinks on the memory will limit you from really pushing the memory very far. In the end, the Gigabyte Radeon HD 3870 is a good card, and it is a good deal to be had at around $200, but competition is so tight around this mark that this card doesn't really have that certain something that would make it stand out from the rest of the pack.