Installation and Operation

Installing the card can be problematic depending on your mainboard's component arrangement.  At 10.5 inches long, any IDE, SATA, USB connection ports let alone any chipset cooler as applicable may very well come into play if they are positioned behind the PCI-E slot.  We also mentioned cable routing.  With the HD3870x2 installed, the card effectively acted as a physical firewall forcing us to rethink cable and connection routing. 

Temperature

Under power, the card was hot and I mean HOT.  We already told you the black cooler bracket measured 145 degrees under load to our IR thermometer.  That was nothing compared to the 173 degrees we measured off those red painted cooling rods.  Ambient temperature inside our Zalman GT-1000 rose 9 degrees Celsius over the HIS HD3850 XTurbo card.  Cases with minimal air flow, can and will suffer badly with this card in them. 

The Catalyst Control Panel reported the GPUs temperature as a smoking 63' Celsius at idle and 79' Celsius under load.  I actually am doubting the accuracy of the Catalyst reading of the GPUs thermal sensor.  79' Celsius equals 174' Fahrenheit.  If my IR thermometer is detecting 173' F on the convection rods a couple of inches away from either GPU and these rods are even outside of the acrylic shroud - I would think the heat's source would be more than 1' F hotter, wouldn't you?

Performance

Testing will be done today using three cards our HIS Radeon HD380x2, a Inno3D 8800 GT iChill and a HIS Radeon HD3850 XTurbo.  Using real world game play with frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program we have graphed three minute segments from three game titles, Need for Speed: Pro Street, Crysis and STALKER.  Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record game play 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.  We will also look at temperature and overclocking the HIS Radeon HD3870x2 card.

Test Bed

• ASUS P5N32-E SLI mainboard

• Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4GHz) @ 3.0GHz - 1.51 volts

• Kingwin RVT 12025 D Cooler

• (2) 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-6400 Memory (4-3-3-15) @ DDR2-867

• 250MB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA II HDD

• Generic 16x DVD-RW drive

• Tt Toughpower 1200w PSU

• Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

• Open rack system

• ThermalRight Chill Factor Thermal Paste

BACK                    NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Operation / Temperature / Test Bed
Pg 4 - Crysis / NFS: Pro Street
Pg 5 - STALKER / Image Quality / Overclocking
Pg 6 - Conclusion