The best ATI card

What would, in your opinion, be the best ATI card?

Would this be the HD 3850?

Ati 3870 x2

What do you mean by best?

Best value? Probably the 3850pro yeah. Although the HD3870 X2 represents very good value for money given it's performance (imo of course)

The best out and out performer is the HD3870 X2 as above.

In the current scheme of things so looking only at the 3*** series the higher the number the better the performance.

As Mike says best price/performance is probably at the 3850 512MB if you can find it cheap ~£100-110.

The 3870 X2 as the others have said is the best performing ATI card currently available, see this review for performance against some 8800 GTS's

HEXUS.net - Review :: MSI vs. ZOTAC: shootout at the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 Corral : Page - 1/11

And I agree with Mike its pretty good value for money if you are planning on spending that sort of cash £270-300

Edit: I stand corrected you can get a 3870 X2 for as little as £262 Sapphire HD 3870 X2 1GB GDDR3 Dual DVI TV Out PCI-E Graphics Card - Ebuyer

3870xt 135 quid

Mike summed it up pretty well. I think that the 3850 beats the 3870 in bangs for bucks, while the X2 competes well in the high end at a fairly attractive cost for a single flagship card. I am bolding that part because while the X2 is priced attractively enough vis-a-vis of two 3870 (making it seem like a total bargain), two GT's is likely to be superior in terms of bang for buck. The Hexus's main site is misbehaving at the moment, so I can't link it - but two GTs has a bang4buck very similar to that of a single 3870, so I find that likely (of course, you it is more expensive in absolute terms, but it is in my opinion even more astonishing than the X2 in terms of bang for buck at that level of performance).

512MB HD3850 would be my bet.. proper bang for the buck without the caveats of iffy 256MB frame buffer..

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Originally Posted by TooNice

Mike summed it up pretty well. I think that the 3850 beats the 3870 in bangs for bucks, while the X2 competes well in the high end at a fairly attractive cost for a single flagship card. I am bolding that part because while the X2 is priced attractively enough vis-a-vis of two 3870 (making it seem like a total bargain), two GT's is likely to be superior in terms of bang for buck. The Hexus's main site is misbehaving at the moment, so I can't link it - but two GTs has a bang4buck very similar to that of a single 3870, so I find that likely (of course, you it is more expensive in absolute terms, but it is in my opinion even more astonishing than the X2 in terms of bang for buck at that level of performance).

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The advantage the X2 has though, is that's it's not seen as 2 cards, so it's not directly comparable to other CrossFire or SLi set ups, so most of the negatives that go with such set ups aren't applicable to it. I wish I'd held back a week or 2 as I thought there'd be no chance it would work as well as it does. Still, don't play many new games, so it would be of limited benefit to me.