Radeon HD 3850 512MB $159AR

I was asking about this company on the video cards thread. I'm really not sure if I should get one.
 
RaZeR said:
Got mine an hour ago. The RAM chips say:
SAMSUNG 743
X4J52324QE-BC12
RA
EG1316CC

I'm gonna put a VF900 on it and see how it goes. Still have to install Windows, so it will be a while.
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Interesting. I got mine today and it's a Rev 1.0. It has Qimonda HYB18H512321BF-10 chips and Sanyo 1500 uF, 6.3V caps. The card is 7.5 inches long and looks clean and the default clock is 670/830. It idles at about 43oC.

Windows picked up an HD Audio something-or-other device as someone else mentioned, but i don't see any connector on the card for an audio-in, so unless it goes through the bus i guess audio passthrough isn't an option.

AMD's own Catalyst registration program doesn't even have an option for Apollo/Aposonic as a manufacturer, so that's odd. As reported, the manual is a relic. Not only does it have a page for Win2k, but it makes no mention of plugging in the power cable, something that i (who am upgrading from a Geforce4 4200ti :D ), forgot the first time around.

One thing strange is that Catalyst is reporting 1 GB RAM, but clearly that's a bug. :eek: It did make me check out the part number on the Qimonda RAM, just in case, though. ;)

I had fully intended to go Nvidia with this purchase, as i always have (i was "in on" the Dell 8800GT fiasco), but between their complete disinterest in adding low-power modes to their desktop cards and their dishonesty re: the new 8800 MSRP, i jumped on the amazingly efficient 3850. My slightly overclocked Q6600 system idles at less than 95W, and i haven't tweaked the card yet at all.
 
I have those exact same Samsung memory chips and can confirm they're good to at least 2000Mhz. Let us know how your Qimonda chips overclock. I found a fix for the Microsoft HD Audio UAA device - Realtek has a driver called "ATI HDMI Device" made specifically for this on their website, so my original assumption was probably correct that the device detected was just the audio pass-through. It is detected although non-functional on this card since there is no connector to pass through anything and no HDMI output, so you can probably just ignore it. Installing the Realtek driver made the "!" Uknown device go away in my control panel though :)

Oddly enough, Catalyst and Sysinfo also reports 1024MB of GDDR3 on my card as well, so not sure what's up with that. It must be a mistake but if it isn't, time to celebrate! I'm assuming the vidcard BIOS is reporting it wrong so will find another way to confirm how much RAM it really has.
 
ATI Tray Tool reports 512MB. It's probably a BIOS error, as you say. The chips are definitely 512 MB.

Speaking of ATI Tray Tool, i've been trying to overclock with it due to the paltry options in Catalyst, but every time i do so, i get an instant BSOD. I'm not familiar with the "right" way to overclock ATIs. Perhaps Catalyst and ATI Tray Tool are conflicting or something.

Edit: I uninstalled Catalyst and installed ATI Tool. I told it to find highest memory OC, and it was still going up at 1044 MHz and claiming there were no artifacts, but i could clearly see yellow splotches appearing here and there. At 1 GHz there were no artifacts. I pushed the core up to 770 MHz with no artifacts. Temperature reached about 75oC and seemed stable at that point. System power was 180W at that point, so i am glad i didn't buy the epenis hype about massive power supplies when i got my efficient Antec Earthwatts 350. I pushed the clock up a notch (784, i think) and the system froze. The 770/1k OC does Lightsmark 1600x1200 at an average 143 fps, while default clocking averages 131.

Seems to be a pretty nice card...
 
I don't like the auto-tune features for overclocking and RivaTuner seems to work fine with Catalyst at the same time so I stuck with RivaTuner for now, although I heard ATI Tool is great as well. I'm using Catalyst Overdrive to monitor temp and GPU utilization since I figured ATI's own utility should be somewhat accurate. You're getting much higher load temps than I am so I'm not sure what the difference is, but perhaps ATI Tool and Catalyst have different ways of monitoring temps.

After hours of gaming and running benches like lightsmark that push the GPU to 99% utilization, Catalyst Overdrive only reports 56C load temps on mine. I have 4 12cm fans in my Antec P182 so we may have different ambient temps and airflow, but still seems the discrepancy in load temps is too high to account for just with different cases and fans. My room temp is also pretty low, usually in the 60s in winter as well.

When I get home I'll try 800 GPU and see what happens and 2100 memory.
 
lawrence131 said:
I don't like the auto-tune features for overclocking and RivaTuner seems to work fine with Catalyst at the same time so I stuck with RivaTuner for now, although I heard ATI Tool is great as well. I'm using Catalyst Overdrive to monitor temp and GPU utilization since I figured ATI's own utility should be somewhat accurate. You're getting much higher load temps than I am so I'm not sure what the difference is, but perhaps ATI Tool and Catalyst have different ways of monitoring temps.
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I compared the ATI Tray Tool and Catalyst temps before, and they were both the same, and the same at idle as what ATI Tool tells me. The big difference is probably ambient T and the fact that i have one 5V 92mm intake blowing on my hdd and one 12cm outlet fan in my Solo case. The CPU is passively cooled, and the fan on the vid card is noticeably louder than the rest of the system. I think in most systems it would be inaudible, though.
 
Good to see people are getting great results. I bought one too, will post my result later.
 
One thing i'm finding that i hadn't counted on: the tv-out doesn't seem to work on mine. If anyone else could check and see if it's working on theirs, i'd appreciate it.
 
The audio device that you guys are getting in Device Manager is the card's ability to pass 5.1 audio through HDMI when you use the DVI to HDMI included adaptor. ATI added this ability with their adaptors and Windows automatically picks it up! :)
 
It's back on the egg now, but at a higher price without the MIR.

I gave up and sold mine for a loss on Ebay -- the support in linux was basically nonexistent, and the windows drivers caused random reboots and didn't support any UI effects while in 3D mode (resulting in exceedingly slow fade-ins and fade-outs of tooltips and such when running a game in a window.

I just pulled the trigger on the MSI M9600 GT OC to replace it, which looks like a pretty sweet card for $159 + S&H after MIR.
 
I also ended up swapping mine out for the MSI 8800GT OC edition that's $186AR after playing with this card for several weeks. Everything worked perfectly on mine EXCEPT it would crash with 2 windowed instances of World of Warcraft running at the same time (3d app error, not hard lock). I later read that there were minor known WoW driver issues with the new Radeon cards. For HD video, single instances of any game, etc, the card worked perfectly for me though, so for $159 it was a good deal. I moved it to a media server that occasionally might play a game on the plasma screen but it works beautifully for HD video, I believe even better than the Nvidia cards by some reviews (although maybe a little overkill for a media server, at least it can do some decent gaming).
 
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