Sapphire Technology HD 3850 review

It's not only Nvidia that's releasing a new graphics card this month - ATI is also getting in on the act.

With ATI's HD 2900XT falling behind Nvidia's 8800GTX, ATI needs a winner to avoid losing the mainstream battle. Nvidia's GeForce 8800GT isn't quite mainstream. At £174 including VAT, it's still relatively expensive. It's fast, but is it worth almost £80 more than Sapphire's new HD 3850?

There are striking similarities between the two cards reviewed this month. They occupy only one slot inside your PC and have fans that are virtually silent. They both have two dual-link DVI outputs and are able to output analogue video to high-definition TVs.

Despite being considerably cheaper, Sapphire's HD 3850 upstages Gigabyte's 8800GT by using a 55nm manufacturing process. Here, smaller is better as it means the graphics processor produces less heat and requires less power, around half the power of a Radeon HD 2900XT. As the graphics processing unit (GPU) is physically smaller it's cheaper to produce, which is one reason (along with the modest 256MB of GDDR3 RAM) the HD 3850 costs less than £100.

It's a sterling performer, too. Its core clock speed of 669MHz is seriously quick and the lack of RAM won't be an issue at resolutions of 1,680x1,050 or lower. We've been recommending the Radeon-based Sapphire X1950 Pro as the best budget graphics card, but the HD 3850 is much quicker in some of our game tests. In Call of Duty 2, it managed 39.8fps (similar to the X1950 Pro) but in Prey it was faster, producing 67fps against the Pro's 45.5fps. 3DMark 06 also proved no problem for the HD 3850. It achieved an excellent 7,203 3DMarks, almost doubling the X1950's 3,904.

The top edge of the card has two CrossFire connectors. The HD 3850 uses the new PCI Express 2 standard, which allows you to install four cards on a compatible CrossFire X motherboard. This isn't much of an advantage when you consider the cost of four cards and a compatible motherboard, though. You can still opt for a dual-card setup using any motherboard with an Intel P965 or 975X chipset.

Sapphire claims that the HD 3850's support for DirectX 10.1, which will be available shortly to Vista users as an update, is a real advantage. In reality, it's a questionable benefit, since several games developers have said they have no plans to start making games that use any of the new features. More useful is the HDCP-compliant DVI output and the ability to decode Blu-ray or HD DVD H.264/VC-1 video, like the 8800GT. We ran the same Blu-ray movie test as for the 8800GT, and the HD 3850 delivered smooth playback when paired with our test PC's Core 2 Quad processor and 2GB of RAM.

The HD 3850 is great value. Performance is a mixed bag; it's blisteringly fast in some games, merely good in others. Still, if you also plan to use it to help decode HD videos, it's a fine choice.