Atomic HD 3870
The Atomic is packaged in a "box" which is without doubt the most impressive we have seen to date. It is a metal and plastic design with handle and so looks like a briefcase. The inside of the box is foam lined and when opened the card is in full view with an information pullout resting on top.
The number of components included is nothing short of exceptional, for starters we have all of the standard items such as manuals, drivers, video out connector, power cable and CrossFire Bridge, however that is not all! PowerDVD 7, Cyberlink DVD Suite, 3DMark 06 and The Black Box (Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal) are also included. There will also be a voucher included worth £15/$30 or €20 to put towards a game of choice. Hardware extras are a HDMI lead and cold cathode light which will add that extra level of pizzazz to any windowed case.
The basic design of this particular PCB is similar to a reference design, that being PCI Express 2.0 with a six pin power connector. There are two CrossFire connectors on the top of the card which indicates the ability to use CrossFireX and there are two dual-link DVI ports. The ability to output HDCP signals and HDMI Audio/Video along with full high definition acceleration (Blu-Ray/HD-DVD) are also present.
The memory on the Atomic is Samsung K4U52324QE-BC08. These are 1.2GHz DDR4 chips and are running at their rated speed. The core is ATI’s RV670 which is a 55nm part featuring 320 unified shaders, 16 ROPs and DirectX 10.1 support. Both the memory and core are cooled by Sapphires custom Vapor-X cooler. As with other vapour chamber coolers the theory is the same. Heat is passed from the GPU to the copper base which causes the coolant within the sealed vacuum chamber to change state from liquid to gas. This gas then passes to a higher part of the chamber where it condenses and returns to a liquid state. The liquid then returns to the base of the cooler where the process repeats. The use of this Vapour-X cooler allows Sapphire to set their core speed to 850MHz which equals the ASUS TOP edition card and dual slot cooler.
