AMD Radeon HD3850 and HD3870 - AMD's salvation? Overclocking, Power Consumption and Conclusion
Overclocking Results
We overclocked the cards using their stock cooler to see how much we could squeeze out of them!
We managed to push the HD3850 to 735MHz/1029MHz up from it's stock of 670MHz/830MHz. That's a 65MHz increase in Core clocks and 200MHz in memory! What did that yield? 1040 points in 3DMark06.
With the HD3870, we managed a 83MHz increase in core and 225MHz increase in memory clocks. Better than with the HD3850! This gave an increase of 1292 points in 3DMark 06. Even more increment than with the HD3850!
Click on the image to view in actual size.
We heard your call and so we present to you: CrossFireX with the HD3870 and HD3850 both OC'ed! Yep, you heard right! That's 2 different cards running in CrossFire!!!
Power Consumption
We've did some tests using an ammeter, and it is pretty evident that the 55mm process has successfully cut a great deal of power consumption off the two RV670 cards.
Conclusion
Both the ATI Radeon HD3850 and the HD3870 come in at a price significantly lower than their older brother, the Radeon HD2900XT. At US$ 179 and US$ 239 MSRP for the HD3850 and HD3870 respectively, the HD3870 will costs a good USD$ 60 dollars less than the NVIDIA 8800GT!. At about the same price, the HD3850 is delivering slightly better performance than can be expected of the 8600GTS which is a good sign for ATI. However, the HD3870, targetted at the 8800GT is just falling short of the latter's performance at this point in time, but the 60 dollar difference might just be the deciding factor for th enthusiast to grab a HD3870 over the 8800GT instead.
As the drivers for the HD3000 series are still immature, we might see the cards getting a performance boost once newer, optimized Catalyst drivers are released, which has been evident with the past few generations of ATI cards released.. Just like the 29XT, the RV670s both come with 5.1 sound onboard and are all-in-one HDMI solutions, something that cannot be found on Nvidia's cards.
It is also important to note that both cards have greatly reduced power consumption and heat production as compared to the HD2900XT. In the case of the Radeon HD3850, ATI has managed to cool it without the use of heatpipes unlike NVIDIA's 8800GT despite both cards having a similar power draw and a single slot cooling solution.
In all respect, ATI has demonstrated the advantage in moving to the 55nm process. That the HD3870's gaming performance generally matches, if not surpasses the HD2900XT is further proof of the advantages of moving to the new fabrication process. Added to that, ATI is pushing for CrossFireX which not only allows for more than 2 cards to be used in CrossFire configuration, it also allows for mixed-cards Crossfire abilities. With this, ATI is starting show positive signs in the direction they are taking, especially with the fantastic price point of the two cards, significantly lower than what their rivals are offering.
At the end of the day, the 55mms have proven to be quite a milestone for AMD. It's much cheaper to produce, power consumption is vastly improved over the R600s, performance is definitely not compromised at the same time. In the near future, we should be seeing more new variations of the HD 3000 series. There has been much speculation about dual PCB/core cards by AMD, as we've heard from theinquirer about the 3870 x2.
With the upcoming launch of the AMD 790FX for quad CrossFire capabilities, the Radeon HD3000 series might really be AMD's salvation!
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