Diamond Viper ATI HD 3850 PCIE 512MB GDDR3 Crossfire Review :: Diamond Viper 3850 HD 512MB Card

The first thing that struck me when looking at the 3850 is the differences between the 256MB version Doc reviewed and the 512MB card. Diamond chose to cool the 512MB card with a 2-slot cooling solution custom design that is unique to the Ruby Edition card. A 9-fin DC12V fan is mounted over a finned heatsink that covers over 1/2 the PCB space of the card cools the HD3850 chip.

ATI cards have the ability to do up to four-way Crossfire (CrossfireX) with four cards. To facilitate the ability to use four cards two connectors are used. To use Crossfire simply attach one bridge between two cards then the next bridge on the next two cards until every card has two bridges connected. It is a simple installation that anyone can do.

The memory on the HD3850 512MB Ruby Edition is located under the heatsink. It is arranged in two rows of four memory chips atop the video chip and four on the right side of the GPU. Each memory chip is labeled Samsung K4J52324QE-BJIA. Looking at Samsung's memory list these chips are 64MB 1ns GDDR3 memory module. The memory is rated at 1ns or 2GHz if overclocked.

The card has two DVI-I linked ports that allow for the end-user to connect up to two LCD monitors to the 3850 video card. Every AMD and NVIDIA video card on the market fully supports dual monitors in their latest video cards and the 512MB version of their 3850 also has full support for dual monitors. Diamond is marketing the 3850 versus the GeForce 8800GT 512MB. MSRP of the two cards pictured here is $179 USD.

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