Asus EAH3870 TOP

Overclocking:

As we mentioned during our review of Sapphire’s Radeon HD 3870, there are some issues with overclocking the Radeon HD 3870 above 862MHz with the shipping BIOS. Essentially, the PLL needs to change its divider in order to keep its frequency within a safe operating range and there wasn’t a divider for clockspeeds above 862MHz – AMD has remedied this with the new BIOS, meaning that there’s quite possibly a lot more headroom than we’ve shown here.

These problems were still apparent with the Asus EAH3870 TOP and we hit the wall this time at an 861MHz core frequency – this is just a 10MHz increase over the card’s shipping speeds. We achieved this using a combination ATITool 0.27b3 and Crysis for stability testing. This time around, we chose not to playtest the usual Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts because of the earlier problems we’d encountered not just at the card’s stock speeds, but also at lower frequencies too.

On the other hand, the memory overclocked even better than the memory on our Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 – we almost hit a 2.5GHz memory clock with our Asus sample, with the card finally suffering from artifacting and tearing at a 2492MHz (effective) memory clock.

As you’d expect, the fruits of our overclocking labour weren’t much sweeter than the ones that came packaged in the box—and they were pretty sweet to start with.

Final Thoughts

This is the closest that an AMD/ATI-based graphics card has got to competing with Nvidia at the same price point for some time now, but there are still cases where even this factory overclocked Radeon HD 3870 from Asus disappoints me a bit. It pains me to say that because the Radeon HD 3870 is a truly fantastic product that we are big fans of at bit-tech.

The penalty for enabling anti-aliasing is the single most disappointing downside and in particular I’m referring to 4xAA performance compared to what else is on the market at the same price. We’re now in 2008 and one would hope that a performance mainstream graphics card is able to cope with 4xAA enabled at respectable settings and resolutions in most games. Of course, Crysis is an exception to this rule (and probably will be for some time to come), but there are still times where the performance drop is much larger than what we’re used to seeing on ATI-based graphics cards of days gone by.

On the whole though, the card looks to be a great choice as long as Asus meets its suggested retail price and that you also know about the sometimes extreme AA performance penalty. However, our suggestion would be to look at one of the cheaper Radeon HD 3870s on the market, pocket the difference and then dabble in a bit of overclocking. We say this because although the Asus EAH3870 TOP gets close to a similarly priced GeForce 8800 GT, it never really matches it in every scenario.

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• 10/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

What do these scores mean?