HotHardware reviews Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby Edition video card
With recent price cuts to current generation Radeon HD 3800 series cards, due to increased competition from new mainstream graphics cards from NVIDIA, there is a large gap in ATI's product stack between the sub-$200 Radeon HD 3870 and the now roughly $400 Radeon HD 3870 X2. Until AMD readies a new batch of GPUs to fill this hole in their product stack, board partners are left to tweak current designs to entice potential consumers.
Diamond is one of a group of manufacturers that continue to release updated revisions of both Radeons, either by adding additional memory, raising clock speeds, or sometimes both. The model we will be taking a look at today is the Viper Radeon HD 3850 512MB Overclocked Ruby Edition - perhaps one of the longest names for a single product that we've come across. Like the Sapphire Ultimate HD 3850 that we evaluated back in January, the Viper Radeon HD 3850 512MB Overclocked Ruby Edition's frame buffer has been doubled from 256MB to 512MB. Additionally, Diamond has gone an extra step and raised GPU and memory speeds from the default 670/830MHz of reference designs to 725/900MHz. Higher speeds and more memory just might be what the doctor ordered to make the Diamond Viper HD 3850 512MB a bit more competitive in an already crowded field...
[read more]
