ATI Radeon HD 3870 & 3850: A Return to Competition
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 15, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Mid-Range Battle: Radeon HD 3850 vs. GeForce 8600 GTS
Until NVIDIA actually releases a 8800 GT 256MB at $179, the closest competitor to the Radeon HD 3850 is actually the GeForce 8600 GTS. We don't need to show you too many numbers for you to understand the magnitude of this massacre:
The Radeon HD 3850 is so much faster than the 8600 GTS at a very competitive price.
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peldor - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Only if it's a HT+Gaming PC. If it's just a HTPC, a 8600 or 2400 is still lower power and lower noise (with fanless options).semo - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
i'm still kicking myself for buying an ati 7500.bryanW1995 - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I must be psychic. I called that about 30 minutes b4 article was posted. Anand must be reading my mind...:)Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Wanna go double or nothing? How do you think Phenom is gonna turn out? ;)Take care,
Anand
chucky2 - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
10% improvement over WHAT Anand? Come on, tell us... :)Chuck
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
C'mon Chuck, one AMD launch at a time :)GlassHouse69 - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Nice article :)3870 can run games decently on 1920x1200 resolutions. Being that i dont care about Crysis (oh no! taboo comment!) or xbox360 games on the pc (gears o war), it seems like it could be the card to get..... If the retailers do not price gouge. Waiting for newegg to inflate this one.
It seems that the 3850 is the same card as the 3870 in many ways. Any attempt at oc'ing will be really fascinating. I wonder if 1 Gb of gddr4 will make this card more competitive. even 768 megs would be nice/adequate
Kougar - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Newegg has stock on three HD 3870 cards, all three are priced at $220 right now.DrMrLordX - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I have to ask, was there any antialiasing in these benchmarks? I suspect not but I'd like to hear an answer anyway.The 3850 looks like a good card for overclockers, since it's just a downclocked 3870. At least it's nice to see that the 2900XT and 2900Pro have mostly been rendered obsolete by a cooler, quieter product that can be brought up to snuff with some overclocking.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
We included AA numbers with Oblivion (look for Oblivion AA in the graphs). The problem with AA these days is that most newer games don't really run well enough to have AA enabled and quality settings turned up (read: Crysis). While it's not a problem when testing pairs of 8800 GTXes, we felt it wasn't top priority for the more affordable and less powerful cards.That being said, I'll talk it over with Derek and see what we can do for some of our future articles.
Take care,
Anand