Transmenu powered by JoomlArt.com - Mambo Joomla Professional Templates Club

Nowadays, this brand also covers graphic cards with NVIDIA chips and some models with ATI (AMD) R6XX. We have tested two models with R670 chip: Radeon HD3850 and Radeon HD3870, both with 512MB on board memory. PCB of these cards defers from referent model and they are almost identical. We’ll start with weaker model, which was a pleasant surprise.

PEAK Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Both cards came in identical, not so eye catching packaging. We’re talking about classic “Chinese” box design with poor bundle. In the package, you will find disk with drivers, basic cables and small manual, without bundled software. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing; we’ll just save the best for last. The card itself is well made but the red PCB with power unit could be a little better quality. On the other side cooler looks like Zalman models and it’s made completely from aluminum with ribs like the ones on Zalman VF700A1. There is plastic transparent fan on top of it, quite silent under load. Fan performance is just great and they have a lot in common with Zalman. By that, we mean that cooler keeps cold even a part of PCB. It circulate air through aluminum ribs and goes on above circuit board surface, where are located DDR3 memory chips signed by Samsung. Their response is on 1.1 ns with frequency of 1660MHz. 256-bit memory bus is the same for all Radeon HD 3850 resulting great memory bandwidth. That means quite a lot to hard core gamers, who prefer to play new games. However, we have one small objection – nonexistence of memory heat spreaders. Their presence would improve card overclocking performance, but this is something that can be corrected. You can simply buy memory heat spreaders later on and stick them on the chips. That way, you can improve functionality and also aesthetics. Performance of this card is not that much different from other brand models and they are just great. Overcklocking possibilities are acceptable even without memory heat spreader, so the final result is 770MHz for core and 1920 MHz for memory. This core clock is a bit higher than for HD 3870, and with same memory size it is clear that performances of HD 3850 can easily catch up stronger “brother” while overclocked.  HD 3870 has DDR4 memory with higher clocks than HD 3850’s DDR3 memory. But, DDR4 memory also have higher latencies on higher clocks, so it have a similar performance as DDR3 memory on lower clocks, meaning that Peak Radeon HD 3850 512MB is very worthwhile.