jmke

We'll give a quick recap of the RV670 GPU core from ATI and AMD which is featured in the new Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850. The first major change over the R600 is the manufacturing process is now 55nm, 30nm less than the 2900 XT which alone would solve a few of the major problems with the R600, power consumption and heat. That does exactly as the new 3000 series of cards use less power than even comparable Nvidia cards and also run cooler than the 2900 XT. This smaller process allows for higher clockspeeds although the normal clockspeed of the 3850 is 670MHz for the core Visiontek bumps this up to 700MHz for this overclocked Black edition, although this is still 75Mhz slower than 3870. The memory runs at 1.75GHz effective, about 900Mhz more than a standard 3850 and about 400Mhz less than a 3870. The number of stream processors though remain the same on all products at 320. We'll see how much a performance difference this makes later on. To achieve this higher clockspeed Visiontek's HD 3850 Black edition does away with the one slot cooler of a normal 3850 and uses a larger dual slot cooler similar to what is seen on a 3870 but with a larger fan, heatsink, and a few heatpipes throw on to boot.


http://www.amdzone.com/amdzone/index...05&Ite mid=29

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