Sapphire Radeon HD 3870

Overclocking:

To overclock our Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 card, we used a combination of ATITool 0.27b3 and ATI’s Overdrive utility, which is built into Catalyst Control Center. In order to attain whether our overclocking endeavour was stable, we looped our custom Crysis timedemo for a couple of hours to build up enough heat to pick up the slightest bit of instability or display corruption.

After some time playing around with the clocks, we got pretty far – all the way up to 861MHz on the core and 2463MHz on the memory. Both of these clocks exceeded our expectations, but we couldn’t help but feel that there was more headroom in the core. Thankfully, having done a bit of research on the topic, there are known limitations with the Radeon HD 3870’s overclocking headroom. AMD released a new BIOS for overclockers, which is downloadable from Xtreme Systems – this unlocks more headroom.

Basically, what it comes down to is that the power saving technologies implemented into RV670 are impeding on the card’s overclockability, limiting the card to around an 862MHz core clock. The PLL needs to change its divider in order to keep its frequency within its 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.

Final Thoughts...

As I said during my Radeon HD 3870 architectural review, I’m a big fan of the product and I believe that Sapphire’s implementation is a good one. While Sapphire hasn’t changed much in terms of card design—it’s essentially a reference card wearing Sapphire-branded make up—the company has included a comprehensive bundle in the box. And when you factor in that most of what’s included in the box is useful, the deal just sweetens itself a bit.

The one thing that’s plaguing both not just AMD’s partners though, but also Nvidia’s is availability of these newly released graphics cards. Sapphire’s Radeon HD 3870 card is currently unavailable for purchase at any of the major UK online retailers, but it’s on pre-order at a very tempting £140 (inc. VAT).

If you consider that Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT is starting at around £170—and in some cases going over and above £200—Sapphire’s card looks to be pretty good value. Once you add in the good overclocking headroom, the deal almost seems too good to be true. Thankfully it’s not (as long as Sapphire can meet the demand for the product) and, if you can find the product in stock, I wholeheartedly recommend this card.

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

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

What do these scores mean?