Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Toxic Video Card Review

[RobRich]

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The RV670 is the codename for the 3800 series GPU. There are a number of improvements over the previous model. The RV670 is built on a 55 nanometer manufacturing process which is the first product to do so. Shrinking the feature size allows for better power consumption and less expensive parts due to fewer materials being used. The older generation R600 parts were based on an 80nm process and featured 700 million transistors. The RV670 drops the count down to a devilish 666 million.

The RV670 supports the latest de facto standards such as DirectX 10.1 (the absolute latest which is only available on Windows Vista) as well as OpenGL 2.0. The GPU also supports HDMI as well as HDCP (also for use on Vista or TVs that require it). In that area, the RV670 has added a Unified Video Decoder engine to the GPU to allow full hardware acceleration when dealing with any HD format.

Aside from the new fancy multimedia features, AMD has sought to improve the power management capabilities of its cards and this GPU features PowerPlay technology. This was previously seen in notebooks, but even desktop CPUs have notebook power saving features now (Core 2). Unlike previous attempts at power management, this does not require any driver interaction. The GPU itself can sense what functions it needs to perform and actually shut down unused parts of the GPU. This combined with the die shrink means that the cards built on this technology should be very power friendly.

The highend model of the RV670 is the Radeon HD 3870 which has 512MB of GDDR4 clocked at 1125MHz with a 256-bit memory bus and a core clock of 775MHz. The Toxic edition pumps that up a bit.

Source: ASE Labs