Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 Expert Reviews

AMD's Radeon HD 3850 Series has been on the market for a while now. Add-in-Board Partners are constantly looking for ways to seperate themselves from the competition and that's why Sapphire has engineered a Radeon HD 3850 with 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory ...

10% faster, Bragging rights, Nice overclocking headroom, HDMI+HDCP+Audio, Low temperatures, PCI-Express 2.0 support, Single slot design

Quadrupling memory size yields only about 10% extra performance, Worse price/performance ratio than HD 3850 256 MB, Noisy

Overall the combination of 5% faster core clock and 768 MB of additional memory can yield a performance improvement of about 10% when comparing Sapphire's HD 3850 1 GB to the HD 3850 with 256 MB. In my opinion this is not worth the price premium of ...

The HD 3850 offers good bang for buck as it stands. We see if this passive version from Sapphire warrants a higher cost.

Sapphire has done a good job with the HD 3850 and it clearly is deserving of the Ultimate name that it carries. The overclocked offering does give it a boost in performance at some stages, and not so much at others. There's no doubt that there are a ...

Proof that AGP is far from dead

Proof that AGP is far from dead

Sapphire has used a single-slot cooler on the HD3850 AGP, with a passive heatsink over the power regulators. The AGP bus can't supply the voltage required by the RV670 core (this uses a eight-pin PCI Express power connector), although a six-pin cable ...

You've read that right: a brand new graphics card with an AGP interface. Much as the big two in the dedicated graphics card market would have you think otherwise, AGP is still very much alive. In ...

Sapphire should be congratulated for not forgetting a sizeable chunk of the population who still own and use AGP-based systems. If you are one of that crowd, then Sapphire's HD3850 AGP will give your system an instant performance boost when gaming.

Not so long ago, adding a passively-cooled graphics card to your system meant sacrificing performance for quietness, with manufacturers only willing to use low powered components that were easy to cool without fans. Not so Sapphire. ...

If you are looking for silence as well as performance, then Sapphire's HD3850 Ultimate is right up your street, as it's one of the fastest silent cards around, capable of playing most of the current crop of games.

Fast, quiet and passively cooled

Excellent picture and sound quality ; Clear screen ; Lots of features

No camera lens cover ; Screen gets smudged easily

Sapphire's Ultimate range of passively cooled graphics cards provides decent performance with no noise.

Sufficiently pricey to have some serious hardware but affordable enough to tempt most users, the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850 Pro provides enough performance to rip through some of todays games titles.

The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850 Pro's gaming performance speaks for itself. While not of the calibre of the £150+ cards, this is an impressive graphics card and should be a considerable success.