Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 256mb

Despite its low price the sapphire 3850 has plenty of extras bundled. Firstly there are the standard power and display cables along with a CrossFire bridge, also included is a DVI to HDMI converter which allows the card to pass out video and audio (5.1) to a HDTV. On the software side we have the driver CD as well as PowerDVD 7, DVD Suite and a voucher for Valve games which include Half-Life  2 Episode 2 and Portal. As a final extra Sapphire also include a free copy of 3DMark06.

Sapphire’s 3850 is almost identical to the reference model with only a few stickers to differentiate it from the stock design. The same single slot cooler is present as is the RV670 core which is a 55nm part clocked at 670MHz for 3D operation. The 3850 features 16 ROPs and 320 unified shaders. As with the other 3xxx series cards this is a PCI-Express 2.0 card which supports DirectX 10.1 and full High Definition video acceleration.

Sapphire have opted for the reference set of display outputs with two dual-link DVIs and a TV-out. As mentioned earlier it is also possible to output a signal, including audio and HDCP, via HDMI converter to a HDTV. The memory is Samsung K4J55323QI-BJ11 DDR3 which is rated at 900MHz. As the 3850 is clocked at 830MHz this leaves plenty of MHz free before the chips should theoretically reach their limit.