Image Quality

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Below is a non-compressed screen shot from NFS: Pro Street.  The quality is very very nice indeed.  Resolution was set to 1600 with eye candy set to max to include max FSAA.  Rather than my tell you, see for yourself below.  Excellent.

Overclocking

Playing with the Overdrive feature within the Catalyst drivers we hemmed and hawed until we tapped out the card's stable core and memory speed.  Memory wise we were only able to get things up to 2040MHz over the 1960MHz the card came with.  The core showed itself to have more go, clocking all the way up to 770MHz from the card's original 735MHz.  Running some benchmarks again with FRAPS it was disappointing to see only a 1-2 fps difference in the final average.

Conclusion

The Radeon HD3850/3870 is more about what it isn't rather than what it is.  It isn't the 8800 GT killer ATi fans had hoped it was but it does bring excellent gameplay to the table when something other than max settings are used.  Image quality was excellent to our eyes in every respect.  It also is an exceptionally quiet card which was a major failing on the HD2900XT.  At no time during testing did the fan spin up to a discernable level.  While I didn't measure temperature beyond finger touch, I can tell you that this card isn't the portable space heater the 8800 GT is.  I'm very happy to see HIS using their high end IceQ3 cooler here which allows the card to stretch its legs a bit.  So much so that you get a significant bump over the HD3850's reference speeds with HIS's IceQ3 and TurboX factory overclock.  Don't forget that this factory overclock comes with a warranty.

The more thought I gave to this card the more I realized that once you remove the Internet gossip of it in regards to the 8800 GT, the HD3850 is a fine card.  Gameplay, image quality, silent operation are the keys to success and the HD3850 achieves these with a street price $200.  I prefer to class products in categories of price.  With this in mind, the HD3850 seems to be in a class by itself between the GeForce 8600 and the 8800 GT.  This $200 sweet spot is where a lot of folks live with their upgrade dollar.  A card with a half gig of video memory capable of playing Crysis smoothly at 90% max settings?  Sign me up.  HIS has an excellent product worthy of your hard earned dollar.  In the under $200 class, this is the card to have.