Got a new Sapphire HD 3850 (ATI Video Card)

Yes, this is another one of those, "I’m going to show pictures of my computer" posts.

I got a new graphics card in the mail today.  It’s a Sapphire HD 3850, which is a (you guessed it) ATI Radeon HD 3850 manufactured by Sapphire.  The cool thing about this card, other than it uses PCI-express 2.0, is that the thing is fanless.  Yesterday I had a fanless MSI card with an ATI Redeon HD 2600XT chip in it, so I was ready for an upgrade.

Here’s what came in the box.  The card (which looks kick-ass) and an S-video to component, S-video to composite, and DVI to HDMI adapters.

Since the 3850 takes an extra power source, there is also an included adapter to draw that power from an ubiquitous power connector type.

Here is a size comparison between the 2600 (bottom) and the 3850:

And here’s the card from the end.  Notice that the top of the picture is actually the top of the card, even though the GPU is on the bottom.  Heat pipes bring the heat to the top.

Finally, here it is in my system, a Core 2 Quad q6600 (2.4GHz) rig with a 300GB raptor system drive, and 6GB RAM that runs Windows Vista Ultimate x64.

Now for the performance…

Here is the Windows Experiance Index of my computer with the HD 2600XT:

And here it is after:
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It appears now that the new bottleneck in my system is the speed of the RAM.  I can’t do anything about that without upgrading the motherboard, but that is for another day.

About upgrading the motherboard.  This card supports PCI-e 2.0, but my motherboard only supports 1.0.  Luckily PCI-2 2.0 is both backwards and forwards compatible, but even so, I won’t get the double bandwidth that 2.0 enables, even if I have a 2.0 card.  So when that motherboard upgrade happens, I’m curious to see how much better the graphics card performs.

As for practical gaming, I found that I could increase the settings on Unreal Tournament 3 to 1920×1200 resolution (the native resolution of my 24" monitor), with the screen percentage up to 90, the texture detail in the middle with 2, and the world detail a little higher at 4.  All the while the game runs smooth.  It is a bit disappointing that I can’t turn the settings up all the way without affecting the frame rate, but with such a big monitor I can’t complain.

The card runs in the upper 40 degrees Celsius at idle, mid 50′s with regular windowing in Vista, and intermittently breaks 70 with intense gaming.

Demos
ATI, Computers, Gaming, Graphics Cards, Windows Experiance Index
5 August 2008 comment TrackBack-URI