ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Max Slowik
Beth
AMD
May. 13, 2008

Specifications

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Performance Summary

With anti-aliasing off, the HD 3850 went toe-to-toe with an overclocked 8800 GTX. In every game, with resolutions up to 1920x1200, it kept framerates near or above 100FPS.

These kinds of results are fantastic for the non-tweaker, although the drop-off once anti-aliasing was enabled was fairly sharp. Just the same, the framerates for no game dropped below 40FPS even with high levels of AA set, even at 1920x1200. I had to keep checking to make sure I didn't have CrossFire enabled.

Power and Noise

At idle, the fan spun only enough to stay spinning, and in an open-air environment, the hard drive was much louder than the video card. Once a game started, the fan speed picked up not long after, but for the most part, it was only a moving air sound. When I tested the cards for overclocking, the fan's motor became audible over the air sounds, but it was still quiet. Inside a case, it would be hard to isolate the fans in any circumstance, and certainly not over game noise.

Idle (integrated graphics): 70W
Idle (w/ GPU): 91W
CPU loaded, GPU idle: 144W
CPU and GPU loaded: 204

Idle power consumption 21W
+ Load power consumption 60W
= Total power consumption 81W

The card at idle consumes about as much power as a game-atheist budget card, although at full tiilt break the 75W PCI-Express limit. By six watts. One watt per cable in the connector... Compared to the 8800GTX, which consumes 130W.

Overclocking

Using the Overdrive utility, it was particularly easy to get an extra 91 MHz out of the core and 129MHz out of the memory, but that wasn't nearly as good as some of the overclocks I've heard of, so manually I cranked it up to a stable 770MHz on the core, the maximum allowed by the current BIOS, and up to 1040MHz on the memory--a nice 21% overall overclock.

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Page 8 of 9

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Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Testing Methodology and Specifications
Page 3: Testing - HL2 Episode 1
Page 4: Testing - F.E.A.R.
Page 5: Testing - Company of Heroes
Page 6: Testing - Prey
Page 7: Testing - 3Dmark 06 & HQV
Page 8: Performance Summary, Power & Noise, and Overclocking
Page 9: Conclusion

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