While we appreciate AMD's intent to keep prices in check, the justification is what we have an issue with. The Radeon HD 2900 XT is the highest end graphics card in the lineup and it's priced at $399. "In another unique move, there is no high end part in AMD's R600 lineup. We discussed this in our original 2900 XT review: In a highly unexpected move, AMD indicated that it would not be introducing any higher end graphics cards. MSI have done a good job with the HD 3870 a nice little overclock helps give it a decent boost over the stock clocked ASUS card most of the time, whilst also helping the HD 3870 outperform the brand new 9600GT in some situations too.Last May, AMD introduced its much delayed Radeon HD 2900 XT at $399. With the price of the HD 3870 moving nothing but south at the moment, the ability to get into Crossfire and see some extra performance can be done at a pretty good price now. Ultimately though, the biggest advantage that the HD 3870 has is that anyone who is after a good motherboard is going down the route of Intel, in which case you'll most likely find yourself with a Crossfire compatible chipset. When you even out the playing field with overclocked HD 3870 vs overclocked 9600GT, the picture becomes a little clearer with the HD 3870 really being able to come out ahead. The price drops take it to a different level from the 8800GT along with the ability to get good performance out of them. The HD 3870 has clearly still got some breath in it. Power draw between the cards sit quite close together at load the HD 3870s sit about 10 watt below the 9600GT when idle.
AMD RADEON HD 3870 PROFESSIONAL
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Vista SP1ĭrivers: Catalyst 8.1, Forceware 174.11 (9600GT Win XP), Forceware 171.16 (9600GT Win Vista)Ĭontinuing to use our new test bed we will be comparing the overclocked HD 3870 from MSI against the 9600GT OC from Galaxy, also throwing in a stock clocked HD 3870 from ASUS for good measure. Hard Disk(s): Seagate 250GB 7200RPM SATA-2 7200.10 (Supplied by Seagate) Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE X48-DQ6 (Supplied by GIGABYTE) Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 3GHz (333MHz x 9)Ĭooling: Corsair Nautilus500 (Supplied by Corsair) with Arctic Cooling MX-2 Thermal Compound (Supplied by Arctic Cooling) Just above the model is a sticker that makes note of this card being an OC Edition model.Īs you can see above, while the same 2250MHz DDR memory speed is seen, the core gets a bump up to 800MHz. The right of the card clearly shows the brand while the bottom shows the model. MSI have a very nice package at the moment everything is very clear and gives us a good idea of what we're getting. Since we haven't looked at the card before, we may as well kill two birds with one stone and check out the whole setup beginning with the package. It's really going to come down to how well the HD 3870 is able to make use of the increased clock speeds that MSI have offered. It did get us thinking though with an MSI HD 3870 OC sitting around doing nothing, it was time to see what would happen when we put overclocked part up against overclocked part. What we found was that the HD 3870 stock clocked card faired quite well against the 9600GT which came with an increased core and memory clock. It's not dying off anytime soon thanks to the aggressive pricing that has been implemented recently. After looking at the new 9600GT just the other day, it became clear to us that the HD 3870 really does still have some life in it.