There is nothing more dissatisfying than when everything in a computer case is silenced except the graphics card. Water cooling is always an option, but there's always a certain level of risk with it. Sapphire has just answered this question with the Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate graphics card. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate features a fanless heatsink for cooling. As expected, the board is bigger than a dual slot cooling solution, but it's well worth the sacrifice for the passive cooling. And as we know the Ultimate is just one of the versions that Sapphire brings on the market targetted to reduce the noise level. The Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate comes clocked in only slower than their Toxic edition. - BIOSLevel

Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate Graphics Preview

The Ultimate's packaging isn't unlike many other video card boxes you can pick up these days, with the exception that it holds Sapphire's own customizations. Unlike the silver avatar on front of the Toxic, the Ultimate feature's Sapphire's lovely female avatar complete with sword and gun. On the rear of the box are the package's contents, which include the card and software, and a short description of the card. Sapphire describes the Radeon HD 3870 as a mid-range product, which we wouldn't doubt with the price tag. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 is the actual high performer in this group, being a dual GPU version.

The Ultimate is the same length as the Toxic, and it measures up to be almost the same size as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card. The heatsink on the Ultimate is massive. Heat from the GPU's heatsink is transferred by four heatpipes to the massive set of fins on top of the card. If this card is installed in the first PCI Express slot on a motherboard, it still definitely covers one or two slots above it if there are any. The Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate graphics card is powered by a single 6-pin PCI Express connector, as the power from the PCI Express slot isn't sufficient and does need some extra juice.

The unified architecture provides 320 stream processing units, which enables parallel processing much like a multi-CPU computer. Aside from superb texture rendering and anti-aliasing capability, the card also delivers physics processing support with the Havok physics engine. While the card supports DirectX 10.1, it also supports OpenGL 2.0, which aide performance under OpenGL games. The card also supports ATI's Avivo HD video and display platform, which enables video decoding acceleration. The biggest selling point however is support for CrossFireX, allowing to scale from two to four GPU's for incredible performance.

Although clocked at 775/2250MHz, just under the Toxic's 800MHz, the Ultimate more than pulls its own weight. With the Radeon HD 3870's GPU and a passive cooler, the Ultimate makes the perfect video card for silent operation. This would benefit home theater systems and silent desktops. The Ultimate only trailed slightly behind the Toxic. We're attributing this performance gap to ATI's Linux driver as discussed in the Linux section. Between the rock solid performance and passive cooling, the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate may very well be one of the best video cards on the market right now.

Linux support for ATI cards is slowly improving, and only falls slightly behind NVIDIA's former flagship the GeForce 8800 GTX card in Linux performance. We can't argue with the Ultimate moniker Sapphire bestowed upon this card, as it is certainly a great value with a silent operation which makes it just great for those looking for a quiet graphics card.