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In the tradition of celebrating Valentine's Day, we here at Neoseeker decided on reviewing some hardware for you. Sorry -- no free chocolate this time, but hey, we did remember the card.
Today we will be looking at a VisionTek Radeon HD 3870. As you may be aware, ATI's HD 3870 is an enthusiast-class DirectX 10.1 gaming video card, with a Unified Video Decoder for improved HD experiences. Many different video cards are available to enthusiasts these days; the primary competitor to the HD3870 being NVIDIA's 8800 GT. Our VisionTek HD 3870 is a unique HD3870 though -- it strays from the reference board design of the HD 3870 in a good way: it sports a more powerful cooler on it, which we will push to the limits in our testing.
This is the first video card from VisionTek we have had a chance to review, so you might be unfamiliar with the company. VisionTek, it in its original conception, was founded back in 1988. It had a modest beginning: a group of childhood friends founded the company, starting it off by buying and selling memory chips from their homes. Based in Illinois, VisionTek evolved into a sizable manufacturer, developer and supplier of computer peripherals and memory products. They entered the video card arena first as in the OEM market, and then more recently into the retail segment, beginning with the introduction of the NVIDIA-supported XTASY line of video cards. Due in part to some litigious disagreement with NVIDIA in 2002, VisionTek is now a AMD/ATI partner.
Let's take a look at what VisionTek did with the HD 3870.
1. In CCC the Overdrive utility only allows a GPU OC from the default 800 to 840 and there is no ability to OC the RAM as it's set at 1170 at both ends and the slider is grayed out.
2. PowerPlay is neutered in that all settings including 2d are set to 800/1170 albeit with lower voltage for 2d and low power 3d
Other than that it's a good card, but these things should be addressed IMO by a bios update.
I would have liked some pics with the cooler removed (or to see actual rated speeds for the DDR4 on the board). Would you happen to know what those chips are rated at?
To zpackrat - powerplay has some real issues, and it's very likely that the catalyst overdrive is limited because of how the card's support of powerplay is "removed" (or rather nullified). I suggest you try RivaTuner for your fan/clock needs.
On that point, kudos to VisionTek for releasing a product that isn't crippled by powerplay bugs
Powerplay most definately is helping ATI break back into the laptop market in a big way, but personally it needs an on/off switch
I'm all for manufacturers releasing updated BIOS (I remember when this was commonplace), but I don't think they will reintroduce powerplay into a card they worked hard to fix (remove) those issues from. There are more than a few card makers not even bothering to help the consumer in this way bleh