While new AMD cards are just around the corner, AMD only partners continue to release new Radeon HD 3870 products. One particular AMD partner is Sapphire who has always been pretty much on the ball when it comes to stand-out models. The particular model we are looking at today is the Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate. We are not a big fan of companies swinging the world Ultimate around, so today we will find out if the Radeon HD 3870 from Sapphire deserves that title. While the new Radeon HD 4000 series of cards are just around the corner, come the middle of June we will only see the Radeon HD 4850 version. While that's a bit disappointing, it's certainly better than nothing. - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate Cool Card Review

Two things are going to happen with the release of this card, the Radeon HD 3870 users will be getting rid of their cards second hand, meaning you can pick up a bit of a bargain, or it will disappoint and it might be time to pick up a second Radeon HD 3870 or a pair at the same time. The front of the box is pretty standard for Sapphire. We have quite a small box that gives us a run down on all the major features of the card. Across the top of the box we can see the brand along with the model and the fact that it's PCI Express. A little lower down we see some of the main features like 512MB of GDDR4 memory.

Turning the box over, we have a blurb on the product along with what's inside the box on the right. Towards the bottom we can see a few awards amongst the many that Sapphire has achieved over the years. Getting past the normal cables and CD's, you finally find yourself staring down the barrel of a Radeon HD 3870 which doesn't have a whole lot going on at the front of the card. We can see that the card uses heatpipe technology to cool the core, and we have a plate that goes over the memory modules. The right of the card has another heatsink that is designed to keep some of the warmer electronics cool.

We can see that four heatpipes protrude out the top of the card and go over to the back. Here is where they split up and go into a giant heatsink. There is a warning sticker on the back of the card that tells you not to touch it while running due to the heat. We can tell you it gets extremely warm back there. The fact that there was a warning sticker just meant we wanted to touch it so much more. We could tell you not to touch it as well, but you probably will. It doesn't come as any real surprise that the passively cooled Radeon HD 3870 comes with the stock 775MHz core and 2250MHz memory clock on the GDDR4 memory.

We really are quite a fan of the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate, the design of the cooling is excellent and hopefully they do something similar come launch of the new series of cards from AMD. The Radeon HD 3870 is still a very capable card, and with the popularity of the Intel chipset CrossFire is a more likely dual-GPU setup then SLI. You do have to feel a bit sorry for Sapphire with AMD being so slow in the market at the moment, a company like Sapphire who makes some excellent products hasn't really been able to shine. Fingers crossed that this all changes when the new series of cards start appearing later this month.

The only real problem with the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate which is kind of funny because it doesn't really seem to show up much in the retail channel. The chances are that Sapphire got a bit bored waiting for new models to come out so they decided to do something different with the current line-up. The Radeon HD 3870 continues to be a great card, but it's probably something worth picking up second hand these days instead of being a brand new purchase. If you could hunt down the Ultimate version from Sapphire, we would say go for it. Silent performance is always a great feature.