When the Radeon HD 2900 XT card was released mid-last year after numerous delays it unfortunately wasn't quite what the hardware community was looking for both under performing Nvidia's high-end GeForce 8 cards and yet drawing more power than them. ATI's start into DirectX 10 graphics was not a good one and this was not a good sign for AMD who not long ago dropped billions of dollars to pick up the graphics company. After nvidia refreshed their core with the 65nm G92 ATI did the same last November for the R600 which has addressed almost all of the problems of the old cards and brought hefty competition back into the market with the RV670. Today we have one of these cards to look at from Visiontek, the Radeon HD 3870 from Visiontek.

As Nvidia did with the G92 core, ATI have shrunk the die size considerably even lower than Nvidia with the new RV670 manufactured at a 55nm manufacturing process which alone solves many of the issues of the 2900 XT cards. The first is of course power consumption is reduced significantly , another by product of which is much less heat for increasing core speeds, and last a smaller die means cheaper overall manufacturing costs. 666 Million transistors are featured on the die.


One area where the R600 had what was a good number in technical specs but probably hurt more than it helped was the very high memory bandwidth numbers. These have been halved with the RV670 with the internal ring bus down to 512-bit and the external bandwidth down to 256-bit, which also allowed for a reduction in transistors over the 2900 XT's 700 million.