Sapphire's non-conventional Radeon HD 3800 cards go head-to-head

[HEXUS]

We pit two non-reference Sapphire Radeon HD 3800-series cards against one another and tell you if either offer good value.

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[stevie lee]

i suppose these cards exist because the 4000 series is coming out shortly, and sapphire are trying to get rid of their stock of 3000 series chips.. might be wrong but it sounds logical to me...

as for the 'silent' cooling - can sapphire not knock up a larger fan, run it on a fluid bearing and then run at a slower rpm.. it will increase airflow, reduce noise... there looks to be enough room on the pcb to do this, i'm surprised they haven't tried it yet...

1 more suggestion for better cooling - as all cards are mounted on the mobo so these coolers face downwards, can they not flip the pcb the other way around so when the cards mounted the cooler and chips are facing upwards? heat rises, so instead of the heat that isn't dissipated by the tiny fan actually warming the card up some more, then it rises upwards to where the case fan is usually mounted and this fan dissipates it..

just a couple of suggestions for sapphires next uncomventional range... (don't tell nvidia)

[Main]

as for the 'silent' cooling - can sapphire not knock up a larger fan, run it on a fluid bearing and then run at a slower rpm.. it will increase airflow, reduce noise... there looks to be enough room on the pcb to do this, i'm surprised they haven't tried it yet...

They did make a version with a big heatsink and a large-ish, quiet fan, I have one and I've never seen it hit 60C under full load.

Asus tried the GPU on the back of the card idea a while back, it was meant to be a pain to engineer with next to no benefit - cheaper and easier to do the same with heatpipes like the 3870 Ultimate has - so it never got anywhere.

Got to say the most annoying thing about these unconventional cards is that they've taken forever to come to market, there doesn't seem like much point to them anymore. Sapphire need to speed that up with the next range.

[stevie lee]

thanks Main - i should do more research before posting..

as for the card mounting - what i meant was the whole card being mounted the other way up. so what was on the bottom is now on the top and vice-versa.

and i too am annoyed that this range has taken so long to come to market.. i thought sapphire was one of ATI's main partners, they should be a lot quicker.. NVidia's range launches with lots of variants most of them oc'ed so why don't ATI's do the same? now that ATI has caught back up with NVidia there should be no excuse anymore..

[this_is_gav]

To be fair, the number of HD38x0s that come with stock coolers can be counted on 1 hand (so to speak). The irony is that the HD38x0s (HD3870s in particular) are the first AMD cards since the 9800s (as I remember anyway) that actually come with a decent cooler, performance:noise wise, and as such the 3rd-party coolers many, such as Powercolor, are sticking on as a replacement are often seen as worse, as they usually don't vary fan-speed as heat output rises and falls.

[tommys]

as for the card mounting - what i meant was the whole card being mounted the other way up. so what was on the bottom is now on the top and vice-versa.