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HIS Radeon HD3850 IceQ3 Turbo X 512MB VGA The new deal ATi's HD3850/HD3870 cards are being welcomed much more so than the HD2900XTs were. Our review unit today is the HD3850 TurboX model complete with 512MB of GDDR3 measuring a full nine inches in length. Card makers are all trying to do something a little different to make their products stand out from the crowd. HIS accomplishes this in two ways; a factory overclock and their IceQ3 Cooler. The reference core/memory speed for the HD3850 is 670/1660MHz. The addition of HIS's proven IceQ3 cooler makes higher speeds possible. The 'Turbo' version has its core/memory speeds ramped up to 720/1820MHz while the 'TurboX' that we have here today gets boosted to 735/1960MHz. That's a 10% increase on the core clock and a bit over a 15% increase memory clock speed.
Flipping the card over for the obligatory underbelly shot, we notice that HIS has moved away from their characteristic red PCB of old. The HD3850 is built on blue PCB that accents the blue fan and graphics of the IceQ3 nicely. All 512MB of the HD3850's GDDR3 are housed and cooled under that same IceQ3 Cooler. Also visible below are the two Crossfire posts. Each Radeon Crossfire ready card comes with a bridge cable. So if you have two and a compatible mainboard, you can attach the two bridge cables for some native Crossfire excitement.
The IceQ3 Cooler is nothing new to a lot of us. It hasn't gone through any revisions simply because it works and works well. A 70mm turbine type fan pulls air into the IceQ3 assembly primarily from the top but also from underneath via small venting holes. The purpose of drawing air from the underside is to keep good air circulation over the rearward mounted memory and power assembly moving for stable operation. Air moves along the IceQ3 and through a bay of copper convection fins whose efficiency is increased more by the use of a lone heatpipe. The warm air is then exhausted from the rear. The rear plate is anodized gunmetal gray which accents the gold DVI ports.
We mentioned power a moment ago. As with all performance oriented cards now, an additional power source is needed. In the case of the HD3850, it is via a 6-pin PCI-E power post.
Performance Testing will be done by real world gameplay with frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program. Results are graphed in three minute segments from three game titles. Some of these are right off the shelf, Need for Speed: Pro Street, STALKER and the much loved Crysis. Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record gameplay from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products. Screen resolution will be 1600 x 1200 pixels in each run with all other settings set to max with the exception of FSAA. Full screen anti aliasing will be set to 0x in our testing. Other setting changes will be noted during each benchmark. Each card will be used with the most recent drivers available off the NVidia and ATi website at the time of this writing. For comparison purposes we decided to go with an 8800 GT since this is what the HD3850/3870 is designed to compete against. With HIS touting their TurboX version of the HD3850 is faster than the HD3870 we have no problem throwing it into the Octagon with an 8800 GT. The only 8800 GT in the shop right now is the factory overclocked Inno3D card. To keep things fair and representative of the whole, we are going to test the HIS HD3850 IceQ3 TurboX against the Inno3D card with its core and memory set to NVidia's reference speeds of 600MHz on the core and 1800MHz for the memory. Test Bed
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