Sapphire - HD3870 review

Nvidia has had an easy time of it lately, with the 8800 series (Ultra, GTX and both versions of the GTS) holding their own admirably against AMD's very late HD2xxx range of cards. And even when the boys in red were about to trumpet a new range of cards, Nvidia managed to out-trump them with the 8800GT.

Both companies were guilty, last time around, of not producing a serious card for the mainstream market, something Nvidia has rectified with the 8800GT and AMD is now rectifying with the new cards based on the RV670 core, the HD3870 reviewed here and the HD3850.

The RV670 core is basically the R600 with added functionality and less bandwidth, but more importantly for AMD's future graphics developments, it is built on a 55nm process which should lead to higher yields at lower costs, and allow faster clock speeds while reducing power requirements.

Despite the smaller die size, the RV670 still manages to pack 666 million transistors into the core, though that's a significant drop from the R600's 720 million. A large chunk of this reduction is from the internal memory ring bus which has been hacked from 1,024 bits down to 512 bits. But to make up for this, the memory speeds on the RV670 run much higher. It retains the 320 stream processors of the R600 and is also fully PCI-E 2.0 compliant, ready for the next generation of motherboards.

Built into the R670 are some of the latest AMD technologies; UVD, PowerPlay and support for the latest DirectX 10.1. UVD (Unified Video Decoder), previously available on the HD2600 and HD2400, is going to be featured across the HD38xx series. The technology handles the decoding of H.264/AVC and VC-1, freeing up the CPU for other duties, and also can record audio along with video via the PCI-E bus through a sound card or integrated motherboard audio. PowerPlay, more normally found on mobile graphics chips, gives a greater range of power saving features for desktop graphics.

Sapphire's HD3870 is built to the reference design, the only difference being the Sapphire sticker on the dual slot cooler - a new series of cards brings a new female character. The fan is a little noisy when the card is first asked to do anything, but it soon quietens down. It has the standard clock speeds for the HD3870; a 775MHz core and memory zipping along at 1.125GHz (2.25GHz effective). The card comes with 512MB of GDDR4 memory giving it an impressive memory bandwidth of 76.8Gbps.

Performance-wise the HD3870 is excellent, given its price point. Tested with 3DMark06 at the default setting of 1,280 by 1,024 it produced a score of 11,800, not that far behind the 512MB HD2900XT (12,220) and leaving the 320MB 8800GTS trailing behind (10,298).

For games it produced an average frame rate score in Half Life 2 of 128.78fps, dropping to a very reasonable 97.06 with 8x Full Screen Anti-Aliasing and 16x Aniscopic filtering. It even performs very well in two of today's most demanding games, Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, giving average frame rate scores of 106.9fps and 43fps respectively when tested at a 1,280 by 1,024 resolution and 4x FSAA.

Bundled with the card are the usual cables; HDTV breakout, TV-Out converter and a 4-pin Molex to 6-pin PCI-E power cable. There's also a DVI/VGA converter, a DVI/HDMI converter that outputs the audio signal along with video, and a Crossfire bridge. There are no games bundled with the card but instead you get some useful applications; 3DMark06 and CyberLink's DVD Suite 5 and PowerDVD 7.