ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series @ [H]

Silent.Sin said:
Anyone else notice that [H] and Anand seem to be the only reviews around that uses the 7.10 cat's? Did they use some sort of magic to get that working or were other sites too lazy to go beyond the CD that came with the cards? The 7.10s were AMD's "performance" drivers so I'm not really sure how comparable some of these benches are. The CD drivers are reported as 7.9s but I'm not sure what that other version really relates to (the 8.43 number), maybe that's got some of the 7.10 tweaks in it? Wish they could stick to one numbering convention, it's really all over the place with AMD: I've got the 7.9 and 7.10 packages from AMD's site that also have ANOTHER version number at the end, 52443 and 53250.
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Well that wouldn't be the first time - from time to time i somewhere elst then AT or [H] but usually i just get bored by the obvious cut'n paste from the spinndoctors presentations or disgusted by the amout of banners... AT and [H] are basically the only "mainstream enthusiast" hardware sites around. I mean [H]ard'nuff to tell me something and still not over my head. So Im not surprised that they have the skill/patience to get things to work - acctually I expect it from them. And the best of it all is that they are complements to each other not competitors :p

M 0,02€
 
When I read "ATi hit a home run" I was sure that meant that at least the 3870 performed a little better than the 8800GT.

I was ready to see slightly better performance than the 8800GT in Crysis then I was going to order one (ATi 3870) immediately. Now it looks like I'll go back to waiting for the 8800GT to dip below $249 again ~ I hope that happens before the end of the year!

I wouldn't call it a home run, decent card I suppose. The most exciting aspect to me is how much less power it uses than the 2900.
 
ZerazaX said:
Well the 3850's price point does let it trounce the 8600GTS pretty handily
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The thing that's somewhat misleading is that we all know the 8600 isn't meant to compete with the 3850. NVIDIA just doesn't have their equivalent part out yet.
 
Yes and we haven't seen any information that would allow us to belive there will be any change in the future.

Altrough 8600gts was always ultra junk where you could get much much cheaper GT and OC it to GTS core levels (and ram speed didn't matter since it wasn't bottleneck).
 
Great write-up. Will you guys have a mini evaluation for crossfire in the not-too-distant future? At least for crysis, you gotta do this
 
First thing is while I generally agree with how H does testing, it seems lately the choices made are sligtly suspect. I've seen in some of their demos that they would raise the resolution over in-game settings. That is kinda stupid especially in Crysis. I would rather game at 1280x1024 with everything on high than 1600x1200 with most of the settings on medium. Wouldn't you?

Secondly, the whole comparison thing was off. A 8600GTS??? Ati told you that their new cards will stay at MSRP? Cmon now... The day after your initial review of the 8800GT, I ordered a stock EVGA 8800GT for $236 shipped from Frys. So anyone complaining about availability needs to stop lying. They are out there, just horribly overpriced right now in most places but you can still find deals, especially if you visit Anandtech's hot deals section.

Both cards run nearly silent. H has already stated that fact. The only real difference concerning cooling is that the 8800GT stock fans idles the card at like 60C while the Ati cards are much cooler. Of course there is a fix for that for 8800GT fans. Someone already posted the fix in the video card forums here.

The only thing I see here is that ATI came out with a cheaper, cooler part that almost competes with the 8800GT. They need to sell as many of these as they can before the prices of the 8800GT fall back to MSRP. But I just cant agree with comparing MSRP to Street prices in this case.

Lastly, H tests with high end setups to take that out of the picture as far as the data goes. When testing video cards, you sure as hell don't want the cpu to be bottlenecking you and giving you the same numbers for different video cards. Hence why they typically use the fastest available cpu.
 
If the price difference holds, ATI finally has cards worth buying. But I suspect that in a couple of weeks the difference will be more like $20 and 8800GT will return to being king of this segment along with the 8800GT 256MB which will slot in nicely below it.

ATI still needs a critical (to me) feature. Flat panel scaling controls. Too many monitors have messed up scaling and will stretch 4:3 content to widescreen. NVidia lets you control that and I will never buy another ATI card until they do as well. This should be trivial to implement.
 
XamediX said:
First thing is while I generally agree with how H does testing, it seems lately the choices made are sligtly suspect. I've seen in some of their demos that they would raise the resolution over in-game settings. That is kinda stupid especially in Crysis. I would rather game at 1280x1024 with everything on high than 1600x1200 with most of the settings on medium. Wouldn't you?
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Well Duh? According to your sig, your monitors max resolution is 1280x1024. Would your rather game at 800x600 on high than you native resolution at medium?

These days with LCD many will sacrifice a lot of graphics frill to stay at native resolution. I will be getting a 24" or 30" LCD next and I will shut down a lot to stay native res.
 
AtkinS said:
*QUAD CF HERE I CUME!.


hmm, i reccon i would not see much performance increasement from the 3870 in quad, due to lower pci-x lane speed per card,

Whilest the 3850 is cheaper, i will get a gigabyte of texture memory, its okey to have 1gb, instead of 2 gb ?:p

well, Any1 know if the cooling solution is quite simular for the cards, cause i got a r600 waterblock, wanna still be able to use it.

got my amd790fx board, kicking ass, and a 5000 + BE waiting in the post system, soon ready for some OC. =)
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First of all, Quad card configuration is a gimmick. You won't get 4 times the performance, just like you don't get 2 times the performance, in SLI or Crossfire.
Second, driver support is required and if NVIDIA's Quad-SLI is any indication, Quad-Crossire, will provide the same headaches. Stick with only 2 cards at max, for the time being.

Although physically you'll get 1 GB of Video memory, with a Quad HD 3850 config, you are still limited to the amount of VRAM on each card, in this case 256 MB.
 
Nice cards, if I didn't have my GTS I'd get this and save some scratch.

I want to see the OC, at 55nm it should OC like a beast.

aldamon said:
My Trinitron still works fine thank you.


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I have wide screen only due to the fact that my viewsonic was 10 years old and the image was starting to shake :eek:
 
Sr7 said:
The thing that's somewhat misleading is that we all know the 8600 isn't meant to compete with the 3850. NVIDIA just doesn't have their equivalent part out yet.
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What is really misleading, is spending a huge price premium on the 8600GTS and calling it 'superclocked' whilst being overclocked by only 5%.
The 8600 series is not obselete and remains to be the best at its price point. I agree that the huge performance upgrade between 86GTS and 3850 can hardly justify the GTS purchase, but that's not the case with the 86GT.
 
Sr7 said:
The thing that's somewhat misleading is that we all know the 8600 isn't meant to compete with the 3850. NVIDIA just doesn't have their equivalent part out yet.
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Actually it is ment to compete, ATI didn't have a part out to compete with it. The 2600XT was priced to compete with the 8600GT.

Good review [H]!
 
No surprise to see some of the usual suspects with their replies and down playing these cards already :(

Anyways rumor has it that AMD has lined up about 250,000 of these cards (compared to nvs 40,000 or so GTs they had ready for launch) and should have another 150,000 out before the end of the year. So you should have better availability.

H has always done this type of comparison in the past were they compared one company's MSRP to the street price of another card as that is all the data they had at the time. BTW very nice review guys.

Glad to see AMD/ATI stepping up to the place with so far what seems to be a hard launch, with a good value vrs performance.

For quad SLI, wonder if any of those can be dedicated to physics processing?
 
Snowdog said:
Well Duh? According to your sig, your monitors max resolution is 1280x1024. Would your rather game at 800x600 on high than you native resolution at medium?

These days with LCD many will sacrifice a lot of graphics frill to stay at native resolution. I will be getting a 24" or 30" LCD next and I will shut down a lot to stay native res.
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First, you do have a point about gaming at a native resolution, but seriously... how many actual enthusiasts have 24- 30in lcd's? I know we are a niche group in general but that really narrows it down. Honestly, I would rather game at the highest resolution that I can run with maxxed settings. Having the settings maxxed out is the static variable.

Now with your specific example, i wouldn't game at 800x600 due to the fact I havent gamed at the res since quake 2 or quake 3. I did however settle for Crysis at 1024x768 at high - medium settings with 4x aa. Then I got my 8800GT and can now game at 1280x1024 with everything maxxed and no AA(so far). This is just the demo anyway.

I can't wait to get my hands on a retail version of the game and see what improvements were/not made. Also, because I couldn't tell a difference but, is gaming at your native res that much better than non-native? I can definitely see the difference in 2d with text being blurry. I just cant really see the difference in 3d between 1024x and 1280x resolutions besides the viewable area and bigger FOV.
 
I also wonder how good ati does multi-displays. With nvidia drivers I can set my two 19in LCd's as a horizontal span with a 2048x1280 resolution and Crysis actually works with it. For playable framerates I had to set the resolution to like 1280x960 or something close to that. But it worked and I know ATI's drivers for multi-displays sucked.
 
Did i miss the performance increase gained after the OC on each card? I have read over that section twice and i dont see any mention of it.

Or were the results gained from OC so minimal to not mention them?
 
I don't see any competition here. Unless NVIDIA's R&D has been asleep for a year, I just see them toying with ATI.

 
"ATI hit a homerun!!!" What a deceiving title, after reading it the first thing that came to my mind was hey those early reviews were pure bull, surely ATI can do better. So I start reading hoping not for a GTX slayer but at the very least keep up with the 8800GT, but performance is not close. But hey it slaughters the 8600GTS.

ATI didn't hit a homerun, I wouldn't even call it a double. What good is having DX10.1 support if it doesn't perfom fast enough?

Ahh but its cheaper than the 8800GT, but cheaper doesn't mean better value.
 
Both camps have some pretty awesome hardware compared to what they were/are selling. To get equal performance from parts that are costing $100-150 less...well shit who can honestly say either is a bad deal??
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There it is, +1

If you do decide to go with the ATI you might want to carefully look at the warranty and support available from the different brands. This is NOT implying ATI's or any particular suppliers cards fail any more or less than anyone else's card, however huge differences in end user support/satisfaction when a problem does occur do exist. It would be wise to take this into consideration when making your purchase. I compare this to insurance, you pay extra for it, you hope you never need it, but when you do need it, finding out it is substandard makes you wish you had forked over the measly difference to go with a better policy.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1234926
 
For those wondering about CrossFire performance we will have a follow up article comparing CrossFire and SLI performance in some of the latest games.
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Brent/Kyle....any clue as when this article might be posted.

I think many of us are eagerly awaiting your review so we can decide what upgrade path to take and see the latest games in all their glory.

End of the week, early next week?
 
I m glad AMD/ATi has acheived a good balance of price vs performance for single card solutions ( and quad xfire! )

that being said, I still want 2x 8800GT in SLi @ msrp for 1680x1050 gaming. I can wait...
 
Could a 3870 run on a 400w 30a psu? :/

(e: "450 Watt or greater power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express® power connector recommended" recommended, hrrm.. Maybe I best build a second box from spares from this instead)


"Ahh but its cheaper than the 8800GT, but cheaper doesn't mean better value."

Seriously, if you had a stand-up act I'd go and see it, you made me laugh harder than anything else has made me laugh this week.
 
Silus said:
I believe so too, but that's just until the 8800 GT 256 is out.
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And at that point we will be able to say, "The last remnants of the old republic have been swept away."

I wouldn't be shocked if the 8800GT 256 was waiting in the wings right now to rain on this launch.

Which is still not a hard launch as of this writing--where are the hundreds of thousands of cards?
 
Commander Suzdal said:
I wouldn't be shocked if the 8800GT 256 was waiting in the wings right now to rain on this launch.

Which is still not a hard launch as of this writing--where are the hundreds of thousands of cards?
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I agree with this. The big question of the day is the 8800GT 256 going to make a direct attack at the 3870. I think we are all pretty sure, after this review, that the 8800GT 256 will beat the 3850...but how close will it nip at the 3870...or potentially bite. The latest generation of games needs both massive power and memory to play at high settings. However, if you don't have the raw power to render it, the bigger memory buffer means little.

So the question becomes will the order of performance be:

MSRP --> 3850 --> 8800GT 256 --> 3870 --> 8800GT 512
Performance A --> 3850 --> 8800GT 256 --> 3870 --> 8800GT 512
Performance B --> 3850 --> 3870 --> 8800GT 256 --> 8800GT 512

If it is A...it is great for us on all accounts. If it is B, then only the 3850 is good for us and the 3870 will be the card that tried...and missed the mark.

I applaud AMD/ATI for getting back into the game; at least at the mid-range level.
 
~El~Jefe~ said:
I am not sure who is both A into computing/gaming and B still plays on a 20" crt at 1600x1200.

not I. i have 21" mitsu awaiting someone eager enough to come get it.

1280x1024? 1920x1200?

widescreen? I love the reviews here, but please, switch resolutions to something 2006+ ?

I can tell its your way of keeping it subjectively playable resolutions. I like that idea, but standardizing them would make it much clearer (as well as ditching obscure resolutions)
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Contrary to your statement, I'm a hardcore gamer with a 19" LCD. I play my games at it's native resolution (1280x1024). I consider gaming at an LCD's native res to be 2006+ still. I'd like to thank you for alienating a large group of gamers.

Anyway, if this is all ATI can muster, AMD has made a serious mistake in buying them.
 
Trepidati0n said:
I agree with this. The big question of the day is the 8800GT 256 going to make a direct attack at the 3870. I think we are all pretty sure, after this review, that the 8800GT 256 will beat the 3850...but how close will it nip at the 3870...or potentially bite. The latest generation of games needs both massive power and memory to play at high settings. However, if you don't have the raw power to render it, the bigger memory buffer means little.

So the question becomes will the order of performance be:

MSRP --> 3850 --> 8800GT 256 --> 3870 --> 8800GT 512
Performance A --> 3850 --> 8800GT 256 --> 3870 --> 8800GT 512
Performance B --> 3850 --> 3870 --> 8800GT 256 --> 8800GT 512

If it is A...it is great for us on all accounts. If it is B, then only the 3850 is good for us and the 3870 will be the card that tried...and missed the mark.

I applaud AMD/ATI for getting back into the game; at least at the mid-range level.
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Well if the techreport's review is any indication we can expect the 8800GT 256 to meet the 3870 performance since the 8800GTS320 mostly beats it in most games
 
Okay, its been over a year since nvidia or ATi really had anything worth buying for 200 bucks (ati stayed in this game a big longer with the 8800 series).

It looks to me that the 3870 is the better buy, but the 8800GT is faster (almost reminds me of 7900gs vs x1950pro but reversed).

ATI is going to be competitive this round thanks to AMDs price cuts, but I wonder how much thats going to cut into their profit (esp since the 3870 has GDDR4).

I think nvidia has gone a long way to winning the hearts and minds of the consumer however, and I think thats going to give them the edge this time.

Screw what the INQ thinks, nvidia still has this one, but ati is now an option again.

They still lack some high end action however.
 
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