AMD's Radeon 3870 card for the most part has been a hit and a sharp contrast to the plagued 2900 XT. We've seen a number of variations of the Radeon 3850 and 3870 from manufacturers and today we have another take on AMD's popular GPU, Sapphire's Radeon 3870 Toxic.

The 3870 Toxic comes packaged in a sharp box with a CG Iceman like character on the box and looks great. Inside the card is wrapped in a static bag and packaged safely in foam. Taking the card out of the box one sees the immediate difference that Sapphire offers with toxic in a single slot and slim GPU as opposed to the normal dual-slot cooler of the Radeon 3870. It's sleeker with a blue PCB and a heatsink that covers most of the card. Sapphire is dubbing this Vapor-X cooler and Vapour Chamber Technology (VCT). The card does run cool and quiet and it is nice to see a single slot 3870 since Nvidia's competing GPUs are all single slot standard cards. Thanks to this the Toxic 3870 is also overclocked out of the box with 512MB of GDDR4 memory at 1152Mhz (2.3GHz effective) and the GPU running at 800MHz. This brings the core clock 23Mhz above a standard 3870 and 26MHz more for the memory. Two DVI outputs are on the card in addition to video out. As with other high-end Radeon cards it supports CrossfireX technology allowing for multiple combinations of Radeon graphics cards if your motherboard supports it.

Inside the box the card has a lot to offer customers. The hardware bundle includes S-video cable, DVI-to-HDMI adapter, VGA-to-DVI, component cables for video out, Crossfire connector, and uniquely a full HDMI cable. This is a nice addition as more monitors include HDMI and people setup home theater PCs. The software bundle is also spectacular with the full version of 3DMark 2006, PowerDVD and DVD Suite, driver CD, and it also comes with Valve's Black Box. The Black Box features full versions of Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 which is an amazing package.

We'll also do a quick refresh of the RV670 GPU the Radeon 3870 and 3850 are based on. Both are built using a 55nm manufacturing process down from 80nm of the previous generation and the memory bus has been halved from 512-bit to 256-bit with no performance loss. As such the problems of the 2900 XT series are virtually gone with good power consumption and heat levels. ATI's UVD (Unified Video Decoder) is also onboard this time to handle high-definition decoding offloading the workload from the CPU.

Here are the technical specs.

 * 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
* PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
* 256-bit GDDR4 memory interface
* Ring Bus Memory Controller
o Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
* Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
o Shader Model 4.1
o 32-bit floating point texture filtering
o Indexed cube map arrays
o Independent blend modes per render target
o Pixel coverage sample masking
o Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
o Gather4 texture fetching
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
o 320 stream processing units

* Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
* Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
* Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
* 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
* Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
* Shader instruction and constant caches
* Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
* Up to 128 textures per pixel
* Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
* DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
* High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
* Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
* Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
* Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
* Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
* Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
* 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
* Physics processing support

* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
* Anti-aliasing features
o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
* Texture filtering features
o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
* OpenGL 2.0 support
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats

* High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
* Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
* Motion compensation and IDCT
* ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
* Color space conversion
* Chroma subsampling format conversion
* Horizontal and vertical scaling
* Gamma correction
* Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
* De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
* Detail enhancement
* Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
* Bad edit correction
* Two independent display controllers
* Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
* Full 30-bit display processing
* Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
* Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
* High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
* Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
* Fast, glitch-free mode switching
* Hardware cursor
* Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
o Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)
o Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
* Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
o Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536
* HDMI output support
o Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
o Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
* Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
o Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
o Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
o Underscan and overscan compensation
* MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
* Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
* VGA mode support on all display outputs

* ATI PowerPlay™
o Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
o Performance-on-Demand

* Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
* Clock and memory speed throttling
* Voltage switching
* Dynamic clock gating
* Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required

* ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
o Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
o Integrated compositing engine
o High performance dual channel bridge interconnect

1. Dual channel interconnect is not required for ATI CrossFire, and may not be included in all product configurations
2. Some custom resolutions require user configuration
3. HDCP support for playback of protected content requires connection to a HDCP capable display

System Requirement:

* PCI Express based PC is required with one X16 lane graphic slot available on the motherboard.
* 1GB or greater system memory for better performance.
* 450Watt or greater power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express power connector recommended.
* For ATI CrossfireX: 550 watt power supply or greater with two 6-pin connectors.
* Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products.
* Installation software requires CD-ROM drive.
* DVD playback requires DVD driver.
* Blu-ray/HD DVD playback requires Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive and playback software.
* For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 3870 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per board are required.

Here is our current test system.

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with Nvidia's 175.12 of Forceware drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.4. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing.

We'll start things off with Crysis, the most punishing game on the market today. Here we see with the 3870's closest competition, the overclcoked Asus Top 9600 GT the card equals it at 1680x1050 basically and barely tops it at 1920x1200. Not bad at all in Crytek's shooter.

Unreal Tournament 3 does lean towards Nvidia except when we start cranking the resolution at 2560x1600 where two 3870's come out on top. The Toxic does best the normal 3870 but can't quite match the 9600 GT.

Quake Wars is one of the last Open GL games on the market but something we think is worth testing. Nvidia has normally faired better with Open GL but the ATI cards don't lag too far behind. As we increase the resolution the 3870 cards become more competitive with the Toxic only 2fps behind at 2560x1600.

Episode 2 isn't very demanding at even HD resolutions so we only tested at 2560x1600. Here we see a similar pattern as we have out of the other benchmarks.

3DMark is a synthetic benchmark but very popular to see hardware potential. Things are more even across the board here.

Overclocking we were able to get a nice boost to 850MHz for the core and 1.25GHz for the memory which yielded about an extra 5%.