Yet another card from the ATI Radeon 3800 series has landed in our test lab. It’s not surprising though, thanks to the major price cut that ATI announced awhile back. Lots of gamers are willing to forego a bit of performance for much cheaper pricing. It was high time that Gigabyte sent us a graphics card as it has been ages since we’ve tested one from them. Presenting to you - the HD 3870.
Graphics cards are gaming commodities as well as multimedia devices if you will. So I find it really value for money when a vendor includes ample amounts of accessories and a game. The bundle contained two DVI-VGA adapters, a Molex-PEG power connecter, and interestingly, a combined component and composite cable. Gigabyte basically merged the two together into one cable, which is then connected to an enclosure which houses the RGB and S-Video ports. There is also a small switch that can switch between TV and HDTV. Last but not least, Gigabyte throws in a free copy of Neverwinter Nights 2, successor to one of THE best role-playing PC games in history.
Most of you should know that the reference card utilised a heatsink that spanned from one end of the card to the other. Gigabyte did away with it and instead, used the ever so popular Zalman cooler. The new edition features a 2-ball bearing fan that is mounted on an array of heat fins, which actually looked like the original heatsink cut in half. What’s more, half the fins are made of pure aluminium while the rest copper. Whether this improves heat conduction is up to your speculation. The key selling point of this card is its Ultra Durable 2 technology, which has been brought over from Gigabyte’s current motherboards. There are three main factors that attribute to this. The first being “Lower RDS(on)” on MOSFETS, which generate less power draw to keep temperatures down. Secondly, Ferrite Core Chokes are used to maintain low power loss in order to hold energy much longer. And the last is the usage of lower ESR solid capacitors for better reliability.
In terms of specs, the Gigabyte HD 3870 sports a core speed of 825MHz and memory speed of 900MHz, compared to the stock speeds of 775MHz and 1.2GHz respectively. One reason for the lower memory speed can be attributed to the GDDR3 memory that Gigabyte chose to go with, as opposed to the default GDDR4.
Since we received 3DMark Vantage this month, we’ll be taking a different method of benchmarking (read the GeCube HD 3870X2 article for more info on the testing procedure). On Performance preset, 3DMark awarded it with a score of 4,374, which is pretty decent when playing at medium settings. Switching presets to High resulted in a score of 2,279, a figure that’s better than most midrange cards. Moving on to the games, we found that the HD 3870 suffered quite a bit at higher resolutions. On the upside of things, noise was almost non-existent while temperatures went as low as 38°C and reached up to 62°C only.
Factoring in the excellent cooling solution with Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable 2 technology, the card offers more than just decent performance. You get no noise, no overheating and a free game to boot. This is one of the better deals out there that is worth considering.
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