Advantages: good performance, keeps relatively cool Disadvantages: it's not the 5770
Well, when building my gaming rig a year ago I came across a problem, I needed a graphics card and only had £100 to spend... The 4870 was still £150 and I saw one of these going on an auction site just under budget, "nice" I thought and bought it.
The Catalyst drivers were pretty easy to install (though I had to update to the latest version to get a second desktop running, and ATi's catalyst program isn't recommended for those that are new to computing)
It arrived and worked, but got extremely hot (by the time I'd got all the other equopment It was out of it's 30 days' warranty), I ran it with my case side open and found that the fan never span on it (Turns out the motor had burnt out from some idiot overclocking it) so I fitted a third party cooler and she runs like a dream now.
I can watch full HD on a 32" TV I have, and have a 2nd ...
Advantages: absoloutly brilliant card! arguably ATI's best card in terms of usability Disadvantages: may not be as power as the nvidia 8800
Feel as if you need a new ATI Radeon Graphics processing Unit? I highly reccomend this one! its not as powerful as the Nvdia 8800 GTX in some of the stats, but its different in a lot of ways
Gaming companies preferably use the excellent ATI GPU's because they find them more flexible for them and for the consumers. and that is why its worth getting this gpu. It is absoloutly flawless with any game or with any video editing process.
The things that happen within this gpu, are truly quite amazing. It morphs and moulds to the game and gives you the best possible results.
take crysis for example. a very highly demanding game. this will gpu will ulter itself to have the neccasary shades whcih make hte textures on the trees somewhat impossible.
this truly is a brilliant card and it gets 5 stars from me!
BUY IT! ...
Advantages: Excellent value for money, Great performance, Good for Crossfire, Runs Cool Disadvantages: Not in production no more
I used a saphire radeon for a period of about 3 months before buying another one in crossfire, and to be honest i was blown away. Even with one 3850 i was already managing very strenuous games such as oblivion and even Age of Conan with an average framerate of about 40fps all on high. The 3850 is a great budget card with extreme gaming performance. As the 4850, 4870 are taking over now with gddr4 memory etc the 3850 is falling dramatically in price, i purchased mine brand new at 110 pounds which may be considered expensive now but back when it first came out it really did rival with a competitive competition and it really did come out on top. When i purchased my second card it cost me a very low amount of 30 pounds off of ebay.
Perhaps many of you are seeing ebay as a bad idea but for 30 pounds and a reliable ebay seller this was ...
hd 3850 agpedition
ATI RadeonHD 3850 -512 MB -Graphicsadapter -AGP 8x -Plug-in ...
Product Information for "PowerColor HD 3850 PCS" »
Processor / memory
Graphics Processor / Vendor
ATI Radeon HD 3850
Clock Speed
668 MHz, 720 MHz
RAMDAC Clock Speed
400 MHz
Video Memory Installed
512 MB
Technology
GDDR3 SDRAM 256-bit
Memory Clock Speed
1.66 GHz, 1.8 GHz
Features
Avivo HD Technology, ATI PowerPlay technology, Professional Cooling System (PCS)
Manufacturer's product description
PRODUCT FEATURES: 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process 256-bit GDDR3 / GDDR4 memory interface Ring bus memory controller Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support Unified superscalar shader architecture Anti-aliasing Dynamic geometry acceleration Texture filtering OpenGL 2.0 support ATI Avivo HD video and display platform ATI PowerPlay ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU technology
