GeCube HD3850: new attire

The moment of announcement of AMD's new family of video cards has long gone, and the market is flooded with new video cards. They have grown up in numbers so that even NVIDIA resting on laurels allowed its partnering companies to manufacture GeForce 8800GT on boards of simpler design to make the products cheaper. Clearly, this idea hasn't caught the partnering companies' fancy. Until a compromise has been found, new video cards by AMD (Radeon HD3850 and Radeon HD3870) have taken quite a good position on the market attracting customers with the balanced price/performance ratio, which will be a pain in the neck to managers at NVIDIA for many more days. In view of the possible shortage for GeForce 8800GT cards in some regions, video cards by AMD may prove to be the only affordable option. Indeed, the RV670 chip by AMD is a bit slower that the competing G92 by NVIDIA, but with the price being 1.5 times as less (in the Radeon HD3850 version), the speed is often receded into the background.

You must have been aware already that in this review we are talking about a video card that is tempting by its low price, good performance and better consumer properties. So, meet GeCube Radeon HD3850.

The package for GeCube HD3850 looks almost the same as that of the recently reviewed GeCube HD3870. There is no wonder about that, most importantly – you can't miss it because the differences are only in the model name of the video card and the type of the onboard memory. In all the other respects, all is as before - the big and strong character, and the "O.C. Edition" label.

The rear side of the package nor makes any difference from that of GeCube HD3870. It displays a lot of specifications, which most manufacturers will ignore and add their slogans like "our video card is the best". So we should give credit to GeCube at that - the specified data can be indeed useful to not only newbies but advanced users.

The package has proprietary stickers which should protect the buyers against negligent sales assistants. But the stickers are easy to unglue, so you shouldn't trust them much.

The package bundle is the same as that for GeCube HD3870:

• power supply adapter for PCI-Express video cards;
• CrossFire bridge;
• 1.4 m S-Video>S-Video+RCA extension cord;
• S-Video>Component out adapter;
• DVI>D-Sub adapter;
• DVI>HDMI adapter;
• CD with drivers and utilities, user's manual.

Albeit not abundant, the package bundle is not scarce and the user gets all the required items for using the video cards, whereas the lack of games and other "add-ons" allows pushing the price down.

This is how the video card looks. Externally, it almost makes no difference from GeCube HD3870. There are differences of course upon a closer inspection, but nobody stated there were absolutely no differences. But nobody told about the better cooling system than than in the reference Radeon HD3850, so its presence over there was a pleasant surprise to us.

The cooling system is fastened with AMD's standard frame that uniformly presses the GPU to the radiator, which is quite a smart solution. In all the other respects, the reverse side of the video card is not remarkable. Let's take a closer look at the video card.

Grey thermo conductive paste and soft pads of a rubber-like material are used as the thermal interface.

The radiator for cooling the power components has turned bigger and now covers not only transistors but throttles as well. It should be noted that the radiator is made by GeCube itself, because the reference cooling system is monolithic and does not contain a separate radiator to cool the power components.

The PCB is made following the reference design. The already familiar RV670 chip is in the center of the board, with the 512 MB of video memory assembled of eight GDDR3 chips and mounted on the front side only. However, its layout offers some distinctions from the previously reviewed specimen of Radeon HD3850.

The video card is equipped with memory of 1.0 ns access time, which is faster than that of AMD's reference card, and is able tuning at 2000 MHz. We'll certainly verify if that is true, but now we are examining the cooling system.

Indeed, the cooling system of GeCube HD3850 is absolutely the same as that of GeCube HD3870. Unfortunately, that also applies to the polishing of the radiator's base, which is not up to the mark, however, that was not an obstacle for GeCube HD3870, so it shouldn't for GeCube HD3850 as well.

The radiator is also made of copper and aluminum parts. The insert contacting with the GPU and the heat pipes are made of copper, with the remaining parts - of aluminum or its alloys. In fact, as we already stated, there is nothing bad about that. That GeCube has painted aluminum in the copper color is just a tribute to fashion and should not be treated as a disguise of the "poor" material.

The fan also has a great number of blades to generate a stronger air flow, and to protect the blades as a result of penetration of a foreign matter and decrease of deformations during the rotation, they were fastened to one another over the edges.

The fan is made by Everflow, a company popular enough on the market of fans.

Cooling efficiency and overclocking

We checked the operation quality of the cooling system in the game Oblivion with the maximum settings at the resolution 1600x1200. We used the popular utility RivaTuner v.2.06 to take the readings.

The card warmed up to 68 C, and the fan's rotational speed amounted to 50% of the maximum. We have to admit though that during the further tests the card was warmed up to a bit more than 70 C, with the fan's rotational speed going up to 60% of the maximum possible. To all appearances, the draughts in the premises make themselves felt. Well, the cooling system has proved to be much better (although we had no doubts regarding that) than the reference by AMD which allowed the card to warm up to almost 90 C. Now regarding the overclocking. First, the card is originally overclocked to 725/1800 MHz, which is not the final value, since the engineers at GeCube will presumably raise the frequencies of retail cards even higher. Secondly, the improved cooling system should favor to overclocking. So, we were able to overclock the card to 777/2088 MHz for the GPU/memory, respectively, which has made it approach closer to Radeon HD3870. But, however sad it is, there were some annoying points: the video card started up stably only after we had set the fan's speed to 100% using the Riva Tuner utility. Video cards based on RV670, like R600, are very very sensitive in terms of overclocking. The video absolutely doesn't demonstrate any artifacts while handling 3D graphics, may hang up unexpectedly and stop displaying image on the monitor at all. Quite possibly, having pushed the GPU frequency down by a couple of megahertz we could have attained stability of the video card even without raising the fan's speed to 100%, however, we can't ascertain confidently regarding the stability or instability of the card - much time may require to verify that. At the same time, various specimens of video cards behave differently, demonstrating a superb overclocking capability or, on the contrary, not demonstrating it all. Therefore, we can't extend our experience to all GeCube HD3850 video cards.

The Tests

Having made it a regular practice to amend the set of tests from one review to another, this time we have introduced some corrections to the list of test programs, i.e. games. That is, the list has been complemented with a couple of DirectX 10 tests which were run using the games Call of Juarez and Crysis under Windows Vista Ultimate x32. Then we also updated Crysis to version 1.1. This is the test configuration:

For variety (which is simply necessary), we tested GeCube HD3850 in the nominal mode and in the overclocked mode, and for comparison we brought in the results for "regular" Radeon HD3850 and Radeon HD3870 running at the nominal frequencies recommended by AMD as well as the major competitor by NVIDIA – GeForce 8800GT, also functioning at the nominal frequencies recommended by NVIDIA. Finally, a few of words on the drivers: for AMD cards, they used Catalyst 7.12 for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. For the video card by NVIDIA, we used ForceWare 169.21 and ForceWare 169.25 for Windows XP and Windows Vista, respectively.

Traditionally, we start with 3DMark tests:

What draws attention is that the GeCube HD3850 overclocked to 777/2088 MHz has left almost all the video cards behind, including Radeon HD3870, and only at 3D Mark 06 give in to GeForce 8800GT. In fact, 3D Mark tests are not the final verdict, so we'd better make conclusions based on the results of all the tests.

Call of Duty 4 demonstrates the same alignment of forces as 3D Mark tests. If we ignore the leadership of GeForce 8800GT, the overclocked GeCube HD3850 proved to be the best and passed by even Radeon HD3870. Most likely, that was caused by the lower memory latency of GDDR3 on GeCube HD3850 as compared to GDDR 4, which resulted in that the memory running at 2088 MHz proved to be faster than the memory on Radeon HD3870 running at 2250 MHz.

Again the same as in the previous tests! The overclocked GeCube HD3850 is superior over Radeon HD3870, although at the nominal frequencies it demonstrates a good result and takes a lead over the regular Radeon HD3850, although not much.

In the DX10 mode, i.e. under Windows Vista using the Shader Model v.4 the situation changed. All the Radeon video cards demonstrate close results which are too low for a comfortable gameplay, and only GeForce 8800GT demonstrated an acceptable speed at the resolutions 1024?768 and 1280?1024. We should note the anomalous behavior of AMD's video cards, so at 1280?1024 they demonstrate a lower speed than at 1600x1200. In its turn, GeForce 8800GT also showed anomaly at 1600?1200 in which, to all appearances, it lacked the onboard memory, which resulted in too slow speed. But there is no need to worry - after all, you can reduce the card's settings in the game or wait for fixes at the driver's level.

The game Crysis is still merciless to all the video cards, even after update to version 1.1. In terms of comparison, the overclocked GeCube HD3850 is right at the heels of Radeon HD3870, almost on par at the speed. In practical terms, you'll be able to enjoy the comfortable gameplay in Crysis with Radeon cards only with the antialiasing disabled. In fact, the same can be said about GeForce 8800GT, although it is faster than AMD cards. But anyway, the antialiasing should be disabled.

Although Crysis in the DX10 mode does not change the alignment of forces, it strongly changes our perception of the speed for the participants of the tests. To start with, Radeon cards demonstrate a more or less acceptable speed (in a rude fashion) at only 1024?768, and our experiments showed that the disabled antialiasing offers little help to the AMD video cards. Therefore, we have to ascertain that to get a comfortable gameplay you would have to push the game settings down to fork out for a GeForce 8800GT that demonstrates greater albeit not comfortable speed within 40 - 50 FPS.

At Need for Speed Carbon, the overclocked GeCube HD3850 left Radeon HD3870 behind. Note that at 1600x1200 the video cards by AMD demonstrate far not the best speed for a comfortable gameplay, however, it is acceptable for most users.

But at Need for Speed Pro Street Racing, the frequencies of Radeon cards almost do not affect the speed. Otherwise, how to explain that at 1024x768 the Radeon HD3870 proved slower than its "sisters"?! On the whole, the overclocked GeCube HD3850 is not slower than the other participants of the tests, if we disregard the substantial superiority of GeForce 8800GT.

At Oblivion, we can see that all the Radeon cards demonstrate an acceptable speed in al the resolutions. On the other hand, it is curious to find out why at 1280x1024 the Radeon HD3870 surpassed the overclocked GeCube HD3850. Let's assume the cause is in the drivers.

At Prey, absolutely all the participants of the test demonstrate a high speed, but the overclocked GeCube HD3850 has proved to be better than the other two cards by AMD. In other words, GeCube HD3850 can be no worse than Radeon HD3870, which is perhaps the most important.

Final Words

The new video card by GeCube have proved to be really not bad at all and certainly deserves attention of thrifty users who are after playing all the modern games at minimum cost. Of course, that is applicable to any Radeon HD3850, that is why the advanced cooling system in GeCube HD3850 is a serious purchase argument in its favor. For those users who are not planning to replace the cooling system and perhaps have no time for any upgrades of the computer, that would be a real advantage. At the same time, let's not forget about the advanced video processing features of the new AMD Radeon HD3000 family, of which you can read in our previous review.

Pros:

• efficient cooling system;
• factory-set overclocking;
• affordable price;
• advanced video editing features.

Cons:

• Not found.