512 MB 3850 out and in stock at newegg

I just bought this with another 2GB or Super Talent. UT3 was stressing my 2GB, and I figured, if I was gonna upgrade, might as well get some graphics lovin', too. now to plot and scheme for a 24" LCD for Xmas....

Does anyone review GeCube cards?
 
Eh, if the worst thing you can say about a card is how ugly the cooler is, it must be a good card. ;)
 
Bah! Double-slot cooler. If I could fit one of those, I'd BE running a 3870.
 
My order says "SHIPPED," so that prob means it's going out in the morning. I'm in CA, so I should have it by Wed. Will try to have it installed and some reporting done over next weekend.

The cooler isn't exactly sexy, but should cool well. If it sucks, I will take the Accelero S1+Turbo off the X1950GT it's replacing.
 
So I come back from class today to a happy little surprise. The UPS man has delivered my 3850 to my doorstep one day early :D. Unfortunately for me, being a college student this is in the heat of exams so I won't have time to let this gal run wild until Friday but I'll be sure to put some benches up when I do if someone hasn't already beaten me to the punch here. As for now you can take a gander at these here pictures:

3850-1.jpg


Take note of the X-Turbo III cooler, for "Extreme Silent". We'll see about that one later...

3850-2.jpg


Top to Bottom, Left to right: Fan (with a side of 3850), manual + CD (version 8.43A), component out, s-video/RCA out, dvi->hdmi, dvi->vga, crossfire connector, 6 pin molex adapter.

3850-3.jpg


Closer up to the card itself. Note the gap between the case mounting bracket and the fan shroud, not really sure why it's not flush. On the other end you can see that the power circuitry has a pretty decent heatsink, attached with thermal glue it appears, and the fan blowing directly down onto it.

3850-4.jpg


Close up of the heatsink. Two heatpipes and a decently chunky copper base. Thermal pads for the memory unfortunately but it's better than nothing. It looks as if they doubled up the copper fin sink of the 3870 and put a heatpipe in each of them.

More to follow. I'm going from an X800XL 256MB AGP to this and I'm sure a lot of you people out there are still on something similar so I'll bench that as well first to compare. I can retire my Elsa GF2 GTS as my backup AGP card now and use my X800. Still have that trusty old CreativeLabs GaphicsBlaster RivaTNT for PCI in case something really hits the fan :).
 
Hmm I think you posted this in the wrong section. We were actually discussing the Sapphire 512MB 3850. Besides the one you have is comes OCed and the Sapphire is not. Thanks for sharing though.
 
BX_TECH_GOD said:
Hmm I think you posted this in the wrong section. We were actually discussing the Sapphire 512MB 3850. Besides the one you have is comes OCed and the Sapphire is not. Thanks for sharing though.
Click to expand...

No actually THANK YOU..I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair...:rolleyes:
 
Silent.Sin said:
Top to Bottom, Left to right: Fan (with a side of 3850), manual + CD (version 8.43A), component out, s-video/RCA out, dvi->hdmi, dvi->vga, crossfire connector, 6 pin molex adapter.

More to follow.
Click to expand...

BENCH! Hehe. Not sure which is the newest 7.11 or 8.43, since 7.11 came out so soon.
 
Silent.Sin said:
So I come back from class today to a happy little surprise. The UPS man has delivered my 3850 to my doorstep one day early :D. Unfortunately for me, being a college student this is in the heat of exams so I won't have time to let this gal run wild until Friday but I'll be sure to put some benches up when I do if someone hasn't already beaten me to the punch here. As for now you can take a gander at these here pictures:

3850-1.jpg


Take note of the X-Turbo III cooler, for "Extreme Silent". We'll see about that one later...

3850-2.jpg


Top to Bottom, Left to right: Fan (with a side of 3850), manual + CD (version 8.43A), component out, s-video/RCA out, dvi->hdmi, dvi->vga, crossfire connector, 6 pin molex adapter.

3850-3.jpg


Closer up to the card itself. Note the gap between the case mounting bracket and the fan shroud, not really sure why it's not flush. On the other end you can see that the power circuitry has a pretty decent heatsink, attached with thermal glue it appears, and the fan blowing directly down onto it.

3850-4.jpg


Close up of the heatsink. Two heatpipes and a decently chunky copper base. Thermal pads for the memory unfortunately but it's better than nothing. It looks as if they doubled up the copper fin sink of the 3870 and put a heatpipe in each of them.

More to follow. I'm going from an X800XL 256MB AGP to this and I'm sure a lot of you people out there are still on something similar so I'll bench that as well first to compare. I can retire my Elsa GF2 GTS as my backup AGP card now and use my X800. Still have that trusty old CreativeLabs GaphicsBlaster RivaTNT for PCI in case something really hits the fan :).
Click to expand...

Did you bench it yet?
 
Alright I got done with most of my studying early today (might have been rushing a tad :p ) so I slapped my card in my PC and took the new card for a spin. First thing I did was open up GPU-Z to see what this thing was running at. It reports 725/900. Pretty sweet bonus since the specs said 700MHz and that's already a 30MHz OC so I get 55MHz right out of the box.

Here are some quick benches that I did, sorry I don't have a professional software suite to work with. I simply ran the benches on my old X800XL at the settings I was currently playing at and then ran at those same settings once I got the 3850 installed. ETQW, Crysis and UT3 are all demo versions. Obviously there are some technical issues I'm going to have to figure out...

System:
AMD Athlon X2 3800+ @ 2.5GHz
2GB RAM
ASRock 939Dual-SATA2
Drivers: Catalyst 8.43A (7.11 reports as 8.432 so I'm not sure which is newer)

X800XL
3DMark05 (Default settings):
5399

Lightsmark (1440x900):
31.0 fps

Crysis(800x600 All Medium):
Play Time: 61.52s, Average FPS: 32.51
Min FPS: 18.41 at frame 1952, Max FPS: 49.70 at frame 93
Average Tri/Sec: 22159492, Tri/Frame: 681630
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 1.34


FEAR (1152x864 2xAA 16xAF Everything max):
49 fps

UT3 HeatRay (800x600 PostProcessing Vivid):
Min Max Avg
20 64 38.489

ETQW (1200x800 Normal 8xAF High Shaders):
Could not remove the fps cap successfully. Seemed to run pretty smoothly at or near 30fps for the majority of play.


3850
3DMark05(Default):
could not get this to run after the install, in fact none of the 3DMark benchmarks would run ????

Lightsmark (1440x900):
139.9 fps
Some artifacting with this one. The main metal doll model did not render for the shadow tests.

Crysis(800x600 All Medium):
Play Time: 44.49s, Average FPS: 44.95
Min FPS: 24.68 at frame 1952, Max FPS: 63.17 at frame 1641
Average Tri/Sec: 32714234, Tri/Frame: 727804
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 1.26
*NOTE: I did not change any of the options in game but Crysis chose a different shader path for my new card so there was an immediate difference in visual quality even before tweaking anything

FEAR (1152x864 2xAA 16xAF Everything max):
108 fps

UT3 HeatRay (800x600 PostProcessing Vivid):
Min Max Avg
33 64 58.773

ETQW (1200x800 Normal 8xAF High Shaders):
Obviously this is going to run at a locked 30fps

Percent increases:
3DMark05: N/A
Lightsmark: 351.3%
Crysis: 38.3%
FEAR: 120.4%
UT3: 52.7%

These numbers are looking pretty strange to me right now. Aside from 3DMark not working and problems with Lightsmark, I've got an unknown PCI device error popping up at boot as well. Something is definitely amiss so these numbers are probably total garbage. I've tried uninstalling the 8.43A CD drivers and reinstalling but something must be wrong with my process. I uninstall using control panel, reboot, reboot into safe mode and use driver cleaner, reboot and install drivers. That's how I've always done it but upon trying to reinstall the 8.43 drivers the installer didn't even give me the option to install the display drivers the second time around, just the other software (hydravision, codecs, etc). So right then I knew something was up. Anyone out there have any insight on this? Seems weird that the card is in some sort of strange half working state.
 
For (&!#@%'s sake why does everything have a hotfix these days? Thanks for the info about the PCI device, although when I was installing the HDMI audio box was checked as if it should be installed. I also tried to manually install that particular driver because some quick googling returned some other people saying it was the audio driver. Windows didn't want that and said that driver did not contain information about my hardware. I'm almost totally sure that's what it is but for some reason it doesn't want to install.

Since I haven't been running games or anything trying to figure the problems out I left OverDrive on in the background, here's some info on temps and clocks: seemed to idle around 47-50C and under 99% load it read 62C, ambient temp is 22C. The memory clocked up to 940 which seems pretty sweet, up from 830 on a standard 3850. The core's clock range stopped at 735MHz but it's running that now fine.
 
Sigh, and that single slot 512 mb 3850 is in stock at Newegg...

I really wish they would ship to Canada.
 
Silent.Sin said:
Alright I got done with most of my studying early today (might have been rushing a tad :p ) so I slapped my card in my PC and took the new card for a spin. First thing I did was open up GPU-Z to see what this thing was running at. It reports 725/900. Pretty sweet bonus since the specs said 700MHz and that's already a 30MHz OC so I get 55MHz right out of the box.

Here are some quick benches that I did, sorry I don't have a professional software suite to work with. I simply ran the benches on my old X800XL at the settings I was currently playing at and then ran at those same settings once I got the 3850 installed. ETQW, Crysis and UT3 are all demo versions. Obviously there are some technical issues I'm going to have to figure out...

System:
AMD Athlon X2 3800+ @ 2.5GHz
2GB RAM
ASRock 939Dual-SATA2
Drivers: Catalyst 8.43A (7.11 reports as 8.432 so I'm not sure which is newer)

X800XL
3DMark05 (Default settings):
5399

Lightsmark (1440x900):
31.0 fps

Crysis(800x600 All Medium):
Play Time: 61.52s, Average FPS: 32.51
Min FPS: 18.41 at frame 1952, Max FPS: 49.70 at frame 93
Average Tri/Sec: 22159492, Tri/Frame: 681630
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 1.34


FEAR (1152x864 2xAA 16xAF Everything max):
49 fps

UT3 HeatRay (800x600 PostProcessing Vivid):
Min Max Avg
20 64 38.489

ETQW (1200x800 Normal 8xAF High Shaders):
Could not remove the fps cap successfully. Seemed to run pretty smoothly at or near 30fps for the majority of play.


3850
3DMark05(Default):
could not get this to run after the install, in fact none of the 3DMark benchmarks would run ????

Lightsmark (1440x900):
139.9 fps
Some artifacting with this one. The main metal doll model did not render for the shadow tests.

Crysis(800x600 All Medium):
Play Time: 44.49s, Average FPS: 44.95
Min FPS: 24.68 at frame 1952, Max FPS: 63.17 at frame 1641
Average Tri/Sec: 32714234, Tri/Frame: 727804
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 1.26
*NOTE: I did not change any of the options in game but Crysis chose a different shader path for my new card so there was an immediate difference in visual quality even before tweaking anything

FEAR (1152x864 2xAA 16xAF Everything max):
108 fps

UT3 HeatRay (800x600 PostProcessing Vivid):
Min Max Avg
33 64 58.773

ETQW (1200x800 Normal 8xAF High Shaders):
Obviously this is going to run at a locked 30fps

Percent increases:
3DMark05: N/A
Lightsmark: 351.3%
Crysis: 38.3%
FEAR: 120.4%
UT3: 52.7%

These numbers are looking pretty strange to me right now. Aside from 3DMark not working and problems with Lightsmark, I've got an unknown PCI device error popping up at boot as well. Something is definitely amiss so these numbers are probably total garbage. I've tried uninstalling the 8.43A CD drivers and reinstalling but something must be wrong with my process. I uninstall using control panel, reboot, reboot into safe mode and use driver cleaner, reboot and install drivers. That's how I've always done it but upon trying to reinstall the 8.43 drivers the installer didn't even give me the option to install the display drivers the second time around, just the other software (hydravision, codecs, etc). So right then I knew something was up. Anyone out there have any insight on this? Seems weird that the card is in some sort of strange half working state.
Click to expand...

Don't play any of those games at 800x600, your video card isn't even being taken advantage of (with the exception of crysis). You should be running at your native resolution which sounds like 1440x900. You got 512mb of memory, you can handle the higher resoltuion.

I'm not exactly sure, but is driver version 7.11 newer (Nov. 21, 2007) than the drivers that came with your card?
 
The only reason I had it at 800x600 is because these were pretty much unplayable at anything higher on my X800. I've gotten around to tweaking some settings and am trying to find the maximum quality I can play these games at right now, and yes most will probably wind up maxing my monitor out at 1440x900. First game I tried out was obviously Crysis, which will definitely be able to run at this res I just have to find the right combo of settings. But man did it look stunning at high quality it's a shame I can't keep it there. I've also tried out some CoD4 and UT3, both of which ran quite nicely at my native res but I haven't benched them.

As for the drivers, I'm actually currently on the 7.11s. I used the ones off the CD at first because I wasn't really sure if "8.43A" was newer than "8.432" (7.11). But I had issues with the CD driver upon trying to uninstall and reinstall them so I went with the 7.11s. I still think there's something up with the drivers tho. I ran 3DMark05 after applying the hotfix and I got a score of 12500 which seems low, but all I really have to compare it to online are stats for setups with Core architectures or higher spec'd CPUs. Anyone else here with a 3850 or even a 70 running on an X2 ~2.5Ghz to compare to? Hoping a format isn't necessary because driver cleaner seems to be missing something. Haven't had much time with finals, drinking, driver issues, drinking, and work to get down to business with the hardware but I'm done with school in a couple of days so I'll soon have plenty of free time (to drink :p).
 
Silent.Sin said:
Haven't had much time with finals, drinking, driver issues, drinking, and work to get down to business with the hardware but I'm done with school in a couple of days so I'll soon have plenty of free time (to drink :p).
Click to expand...

It's Friday night, so I guess you won't be getting away from drinking. Haha. Cheers.
 
Put mine in today. Overdrive put it right at 735MHz/1900MHz.

Had to scale back a couple things in HG:L, but it looked pretty sweet.
 
I use rivatuner and got it up to 775/1000 so this is pretty much on par with a stock 3870 :D. Try to use rivatuner, Down8, Overdrive maxes out at 735. I'd hug my videocard like that other weirdo on here but that'd mean taking it out of my case and I'm having too much fun playing with it right now. Can't say I'm disappointed at those results at all. Crysis at high settings at 1440x900 is more playable at these clocks but it's still a little too choppy to call smooth. Everything else runs like butter at my native res and the highest settings. Hopefully someone figures out a software voltage mod for this card and I can push it even further.

I don't know if rivatuner is detecting the temps correctly because they don't seem to change much at all between idle/load but it isn't going over 70C whatsoever, it seems to plateau at 67C, and it idles in the 50s at 50% locked fan speed. 50% fan is nearly silent, my case fans and Freezer64 seem to drown it out (actually the fan in my external HD enclosure trumps them all, damn tiny whiny bastard), 60% I can hear it just barely. 100% fan sounds ridiculous, pretty sure you could clean your yard with it, but I don't think that it would ever get to be that level unless your name is Satan and your ambient temps are 666 degrees.
 
My 1950GT idled at like 35*C, and loaded around 45*C with a Accelero S1+Turbo.

The HD3850 is idling just under 50*C and loads around 60*C.

The CM690 with a dozen fans helps. :D
 
Here are some 1440x900 High Quality Crysis results at 770/1000:

Play Time: 72.44s, Average FPS: 27.61
Min FPS: 6.81 at frame 144, Max FPS: 34.70 at frame 984
Average Tri/Sec: -26809596, Tri/Frame: -970996
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -0.94
 
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