Radeon HD3800 is the coming graphics card series from AMD/ATI which is suppose to battle NVIDIA and the new GeForce 8800 GT/GTS models, which are upper mid-range / lower high-end cards, offer a lot of performance for a sensible amount of money. Information from AMD has now started to leak and the news are both good and bad. First of all, the frequencies will be lower than expected as the cooling isn’t enough for the 800MHz clock frequencies we were expecting. Instead of going with a more powerful cooling AMD settled for lowering the frequencies, and lower the prices at the same time.
The prices will be very aggressive and able to measure up to NVIDIA and GeForce 8800 GT. The two RV670 chips, Radeon HD3850 and Radeon HD3870, will cost from $149 USD up to $230, depending on the configuration. The top model, HD3870, will sport a graphics processor working at 775 MHz and 512 MB GDDR4 memory running at 2.4GHz DDR. HD3850 has to settle for a GPU at 668 MHz and 256 MB 1.65 GHz GDDR3 memory. Other than that the two are identical with DirectX 10.1, UVD and HDMI support.
The prices are certainly appealing, but the question is if the performance is really enough to fight NVIDIA’s newest addition. On November 19 we will know for certain.
