Verdict: ATI locks S-Foils in attack position.
It seems that ATI has been drawing inspiration from 'Star Wars' with the HD 3-series. With Nvidia building more powerful Death Star GPUs, ATI has adopted the approach of the Rebel Alliance by making the HD 3850 and HD 3870 small one-man fighters; cards sent out at a mid-range price point to try to exploit Nvidia's weak points rather than face the big guns head on.
This is a wise strategy, as Nvidia's budget graphics cards are notably less impressive than the company's expensive high-end cards. While the £160 GeForce 8800 GT is a powerful card for the money, the only Nvidia cards available for around £100 are based around the woefully underpowered GeForce 8600 GPU. Not surprisingly, therefore, ATI has focused its first wave of attack in this low price range.
The pre-overclocked PowerColor HD 3850 comes in at a very reasonable £129, but cards based on the reference heatsink can be found for £110. The Sapphire card on p55, for example, costs £107, thanks to its reference design. With a massive 320 stream processors, 16 texture units and 16 ROPs, the HD 3850 is remarkably similar to the £230 Radeon HD 2900 XT - for almost half the price, you get a lot of GPU.
Or, rather, you don't, as the HD 3850 has been built using the smallest fabrication process - 55nm - used for a GPU. This makes the HD 3850 very power-efficient, as smaller transistors require less power to switch and create less heat; as a result, HD 3850 cards can use more modest coolers and our test system drew just 240W at full load. These two factors might make CrossFire with HD 3850s a more attractive proposition, but they also help single cards, too. However, PowerColor has replaced the reference ATI cooler.
The cooler is a 'copper flower' HSF from ZEROtherm. It is so large that it takes up two slots, and with the card up and running, it was louder than the fan on the HD 3870 reference cooler. If you demand low noise from your PC then this card won't suit you. We like the inclusion of the HDMI output though.
Beyond the GPU and its cooling, PowerColor has embellished the card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, 256MB more than the reference design. The speed of this memory has been overclocked from 830MHz (1.66MHz effective) to 900MHz (1.8GHz effective). This memory boost should help the card to deal with larger textures and higher resolutions, although performance will be limited by the 256-bit memory bus. The core speed of the GPU has also been increased from 669MHz to 720MHz. Overclocking the core of the GPU also speeds up the stream processors, so this pre-overclock should have a significant effect on performance.
For such a cheap card, performance was generally good at 1,680 x 1,050, with F.E.A.R. and Need for Speed: Carbon returning playable frame rates. Switching to Vista and running the new Unreal Tournament 3 demo offered a smooth minimum frame rate of 33fps and an average of 59fps at the same settings. However, there are rumours that the full game will be harder to run than the demo.
Unfortunately, the PowerColor was as pants as every other card we've tested in Crysis, and for some reason, it would not run S.T.A.L.K.E.R. at 1,920 x 1,200. We also couldn't find an overclocking application that would work with the card, although this type of problem is common with new cards. No doubt the situation will be rectified soon.
Conclusion
The fact that ATI has a graphics card worth buying now is great - the HD 3850 GPU is strong enough to allow ATI to think about turning off its targeting computer and trusting in the Force as it runs down the canyons of the Nvidia Death Star. However, the biggest lure of the HD 3850 is the immense price-to-performance ratio; the more expensive it becomes (through pre-overclocking and customisation), the less appealing it appears.
At £130, this card is close to locking lightsabers with the SithForce 8800 GT, which costs £160, and a GeForce 8800 GT easily outperforms even this pre-overclocked HD 3850. We were also disappointed by the noise from the cooler. If you don't want to spend much more than £100, we suggest opting for the basic Sapphire HD 3850 on p55, and tweaking it yourself. If you're willing to loosen the purse strings, though, Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT makes more sense.
