Verdict: ATI's best GPU for years, but it can't beat the 8800 GT.

Although the entire HD 2000-series was very disappointing, ATI's next move wasn't to go back to the drawing board and design a new GPU, but to respin the HD 2000-series. The end result was the HD 3000-series GPUs, which not only run faster than the HD 2000-series, but also consume less power. This is due to the use of 55nm transistors instead of the far less efficient 65nm and 80nm transistors used by the various models of the HD 2000-series.

As with the HD 2000-series, the stream processors in an HD 3000-series GPU are clocked at the same frequency as the GPU core - in the case of the HD 3850, this is 669MHz. In fact, the HD 3850 has 320 stream processors, the same number as the far more expensive HD 2900 XT, to perform its calculations. Despite its aggressive pricing, the HD 3850 has 16 ROPs and 256MB of GDDR3 running at 828MHz (1.66GHz effective). This means that the HD 3850 is far more capable than the HD 2600 XT, although it suffers from the same very poor anti-aliasing performance of the HD 2000-series.

The Radeon HD 3850 also supports Shader Model 4.1 and DirectX 10.1, although there are currently no games that support these APIs.

Despite its budget pricing, the high-end heritage of HD 3850 allowed it to play Need for Speed: Pro Street smoothly at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA. However, Call of Duty 4 is considerably more demanding and only played smoothly at 1,024 x 768. Like the vast majority of cards in this Labs test, the HD 3850 was unable to play Crysis smoothly at any of our test settings.

The HD 3850 delivers great performance for a little over £100 and is easily capable of playing most DirectX 9 games smoothly at 1,024 x 768 or higher. However, the latest games give this little card a nasty shock, especially if you like to game with anti-aliasing enabled.

• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008

• Creative Zen X-Fi with Wireless LAN 16GB - Peripherals
• DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS - Motherboards
• Hyundai W240D-PVA - TFT monitors
• Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD - Hard disks / storage
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky - Games
• LanCool Metal-Boned K10 - Cases
• Asus Maximus II Formula - Motherboards