Throughout most of the 1990's, Diamond Multimedia was surely one of the major players in the graphics card world. Their well made cards with solid performance resulted in some of the most well known brand names of the time including the Speedstar, Stealth and Viper. And the good news is, with some more time and resources under their belt, Diamond has completely revitalized the Viper name in both body and spirit. Once again, with high-end products at the core, Diamond is a force to be reckoned with in the market. Today, we've got two of their Radeon HD 3870's in the labs for comparison, one is mostly plain vanilla but the other is an overclocked version utilizing GDDR4 memory. - HotHardware

Diamond Viper HD 3870 Graphics Showcase Preview

The two Radeon HD 3870 variants that Diamond released are twins with the only real immediately noticeable difference being the sticker placed over the cooling apparatus. The standard model is marked as the Radeon HD 3870 GDDR4, while the overclocked model remains known only as Radeon HD 3870 with no mention made to the overclocked status, nor the larger memory buffer found onboard. Other than these markings and Ruby's stern visage, there is little that Diamond has done differently when compared to ATI's initial design for these Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards but still they have gone down the 1GB path.

The dual slot cooler consists of a rear mounted fan that starts out a bit noisy while booting up the PC, but quickly settles down during normal operation and doesn't produce enough noise output to become a bother. Heat that is transferred from the RV670 using a set of heatpipes to the copper heatsink mounted on top, running nearly the entire length of the card. Small vents in the plastic allow some heat dissipation, but the majority of the airflow rushes out the end of the card, and thus out of the chassis. The sub-$200 price point of these cards makes them not only a good choice for running one, but also running multiple cards.

Currently, the Radeon HD 3870 is ATI's mid-range GPU offering, and Diamond has produced two cards that did not disappoint. The first is essentially just a re-brand, using the core and memory speeds called for by ATI's specs, while the second is an overclocked version stocked with 1GB of memory, albeit slower GDDR3. Both performed well throughout our testing suite, but the edge overall will go to the 1GB laden Viper, whose frame rates typically eclipsed its brethren by a few percentage points. Normally, when we've got a couple of pieces of hardware to cover, we break up our conclusion to cover each piece itself.

Thus we decided to wrap them both up in a single, succinct, conclusion, and yet still hope to make a few points where the cards differ. Diamond continues their tradition of the Viper brand name by releasing dual versions based on the Radeon HD 3870 version. While the benchmarks prove that NVIDIA still holds the upper hand in performance, it's fair to say that ATI has a good competitor in the price versus performance department, with many Radeon HD 3870 models, including Diamond's 512MB version, currently hovering around $150 these days. This is certainly the strong point of the Radeon HD 3870, the low price to buy one.

The 1GB GDDR3 version comes with a higher clocked GPU to go along with the double sized memory buffer, but these additions didn't offer all that much more performance. Couple the overclocked 1GB model's with the only slightly higher performance and its significantly higher price of around $230, and it's difficult to justify spending the extra money, especially now that the Radeon HD 4850 has arrived for about the same price. Each cards' retail bundle also offer little other than a basic list of extras, differing with whichever card you choose. Some extra game would be nice to see added the the Diamond bundle and to standout.

It was good to see the extra cables found in the 1GB Viper's box, but surely there's not enough there to even help mitigate the price difference. With the way things are now, we're feeling snakebit, as it's almost a toss-up between these two Vipers. The 512MB performed well, and is cheaper, but really doesn't offer anything new that we haven't seen before. On the other hand, the 1GB gave us better numbers, yet the price point makes it a hard sell.