The ATI Radeon HD 3870 is a decent package at a very fair price but the fact remains that AMD’s latest and greatest graphics card can't quite take the fight to Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT. There’s Cyberlink DVD Suite for producing DVDs, CyberLink PowerDVD 7 for watching them, and a voucher for Valve’s Black Box which consists of Half-life 2 Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2. You pay £30 more for the MSI 8800GT than you do for the Sapphire HD 3870, and Sapphire chucks in a moderate bundle of software to make the deal even more appealing. However, the 8800GT was running at a higher resolution than the Sapphire 3870 and it still returned higher frame rates.

The figures are a little confused as we used different screen resolutions for Crysis. In 3DMark06 and FEAR: Extraction Point the performance of the two cards in CrossFire was epic.įEAR: Extraction Point Results Results in average frames per secondįor comparison, we used an MSI GeForce 8800GT which consistently beat the 3870. Although we patched the drivers with a hotfix for Crysis, we found that CrossFire performance in the new game was lower than a single graphics card so it's clear that the drivers need some work. The difference in noise levels and heat output was quite astonishing, however, as the 2900 was horrible and offensive while the 3870 was cool, calm and collected.Ĭrysis Results Results in average frames per secondĪs we had a pair of the PowerColors we ran them in CrossFire to get an idea how we expect the 3870 to scale. The contest was a little unfair as we were using a PowerColor HD 2900 XT with 1GB of GDDR 4 memory instead of the more usual 512MB, but broadly speaking the 3870 and the 2900 XT had similar performance. We tested a Sapphire HD 3870 on an MSI X38 Diamond motherboard with an Intel 45nm Core 2 Extreme QX9650 'Penryn' processor and 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 memory running on Windows XP SP2.

Sapphire hd 3870 drivers