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Diamond ATI HD 3850/3870 Review :: Diamond ATI HD 3870
 Top Shot  Angle Shot  Active Fan  Power Connector This card was not exactly what we thought it would be, but it is still ATI making headways in the right direction. The R670 was the most hyped ATI chipset in years and it does have some nice new things that make it appealing to gamers. Is smaller better? If so then the R670 has something over the competition, as the G92 GPU is bigger by 10nm than the R670 which is based on new 55nm design instead of the 65nm spec that the G92 uses. The most recent trend for GPUs has been to keep getting bigger and bigger, but ATI has taken a bold move in pushing 55nm technology forward and this will have a few impacts on the industry. Smaller die sizes usually equate to better yields and better pricing, as well as being less power consuming and cooler running in your system. The thing is, having a 55nm GPU is the only real advancement here, the meat so to speak remains quite the same.  PCIe 2x  Heatsink  Memory Heatsink  Crosslink It seems like having 512MB of memory is a bit of a back down on specs though as the old ATI 2900XT had a full gigabyte of G-DDR4 memory. How all this translates into the performance aspect of the card is yet to be seen but there must be a hit somewhere with the implementation of less memory. ATI has always done things differently from NVIDIA and this is usually very much evident in their GPU design, but the R670 just doesn’t differentiate itself enough from the R600 to warrant the introduction of a new series of cards. There are still 320 Steam Engines and the time to introduce some new texturing units should have been now, but still we see 16 texturing units and 16 ROP instead of something more with the R670. Why ATI did not implement more into this GPU is a bit vague, but the fact alone of taking the die to a 55nm is no small feat in itself. This card could have just come out as a 2900 XTX and that may have been a better thing. The new 3800 series implements the new PCIe 2X standard that will add increased bandwidth (on paper anyways) on new motherboards that support that spec, but results that support this are yet to be seen.  Top Shot  Card Back  Model #  I/O Connectors Contents:Discuss This Article
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