Radeon HD 3850

Radeon HD 3850 turns down the clocks compared to the product we've just described.  Running at 670MHz or so with 880MHz memory, HD 2900 XT has it beat across the board, so expect performance to lie about 10-20% below HD 3870 and HD 2900 XT when the final reckoning is reckoned, based on on-paper specs.

That lesser clock rate means less power consumption and less heat, with just one slot of cooling solution required.  If it's anything like the cooler on HD 2600 products, and we think it is, the cooler will be slightly too loud and hissy for most and will need some software help to tune the noise it makes.  Whispers abound that noise has been tuned, though, versus HD 2600 products (especially the HD 2600 XT), and that HD 3850 is quiet as a mouse most of the time.  Here's hoping.



The single-slot cooler is what lets the HD 3850 best support CrossfireX, the upcoming Crossfire competency bump that lets more than 2 GPUs take part in the rendering process.  Four GPUs are what's being demonstrated today if you know where to look, which means total support for 8 dual-link DVI displays and all that means.  An upcoming driver will bring support for multi-screen Crossfire, too.  Rejoice!

It's a full RV670 under the hood of HD 3850, AMD not cutting any corners in terms of unit count, and everything else from DP to DX10.1 to UVD is there or supported, just like the HD 3870 flagship.  It's just a little slower on paper.

Price for the HD 3850 is less than 200 Euros.  In fact it's set to be some 30 Euros less if AMD's pricing is to be believed (and we do in the long run), and while the reference design only sports 256MiB of framebuffer -- something which makes it less useful in a 4-way AFR setup than you might initially think, sadly -- it should offer competitive performance versus over sub-200 Euro performance graphics products. There will definitely be 512MiB boards from certain AIBs, however, with pricing still a fair bit below the HD 3870's.