Author: Kevin Spiess
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Thursday, December 27th, 2007
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/asus_hd3870/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
Santa must have had some renovations done to his workshop, in order to accommodate all of the new video cards that came out over the last two months. It all started around Halloween, which had a little extra bang to it this year, with the release of NVIDIA's 8800 GT. While that card might of attracted the lion's share of the spotlight, AMD/ATI released its response, its own 'killer-card' around the mid-two hundred dollar price point, about two weeks later: the HD 3870.
Today we are going to look at a factory-overclocked HD 3870 from Asus: the Asus EAH3870 TOP. A few weeks ago, I was impressed with the combination of performance and price found in PowerColor's HD 3850 Xtreme PCS video card. Maybe the HD 3850 bigger brother will be just as impressive.
Asus EAH3870 TOP left, Powercolor HD3850 Xtreme PCS right.
Alright, let's take a look at this bad-boy.
The Asus EAH3870 is more on the hefty side of cards, than the slight. It was a double-slot cooler and feels a lot heavier than you'd guess it would, judging from looks. Which much thicker than its nemesis, the 8800 GT, the HD 3870 is about the same length, at a little under 9 inches. You can see some resemblance between the HD 3870 and the HD 2900 XT, but not that much -- in a way, the HD 3870 looks like a 'HD 2900 XT Lite.'
As for the cooler, through the red plastic, you can see a solid block of aluminum fins mounted to the centre of the board. This stretch of GPU-cooling heat-fins are all aligned so that air is expediently pushed through, flowing over the card and out the rear. While the Asus EAH3870 heat sink doesn't have nearly as much metal as a HD 2900 XT, or say, 8800 GTS does, the amount it does have does look substantial enough to provide adequate cooling. Unlike some HD 3850 cards that I have seen, this HD 3870 also has copper-colored aluminum heat sinks on the memory, connected by thermal tape.
A standard-sized fan dominates the right side of the PCB, ready for both duties: cooling the heat sink, and getting air flowing off of the memory as well.
The Asus EAH3870 features a Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts decal on the cooler, on which a German Panzer-commander stares off to the right side of the video card (perhaps dreaming of ledenhosen and blitzkrieg'ing), and a Canadian artillery officer stares off to the left (perhaps dreaming of hockey and incendiary grenades.) Besides the decal, there isn't all that much apparent difference between this Asus video card and the reference board design.
The HD 3870 has 320 stream processors (same amount as the HD 2900 XT), as well as 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs. Being an TOP edition, Asus has overclocked this video card. The GPU clock is set to 850 MHz, while the 512MB of GDDR4 memory is clocked to 1143 MHZ. Unlike the HD 2900 XT, the HD 3870 has a 256-bit memory interface. A 256-bit memory bus was sufficient to allow for some great performance from the 8800 GT cards, so, hopefully this will hold true for the HD 3870 as well.
On the back end of the card we have the standard double DVI outputs, which support resolutions up to 3840x2400.
The Box
The Asus EAH3870 TOP comes in a big gray box, with the two familiar soldiers of Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts, taking up about half the box. Sometimes, bundeled games only warrant a sticker on a video card's box -- it's interesting to see how far Asus teamed up with Relic to cross-promote their video card with this AAA title. Opening the box's cover up reveals more about Opposing Fronts, as well as a mention of a new piece of Asus software: the Gamer OSD. However, the box does lack listing the game's minimum system requirements.
The TOP (Top Overclocking Performance) branding is also very noticeable here -- so no searching serial codes to see if you are getting the overclocked version of the card. A marketing graph boldly embellishes the performance gains of the overclocked TOP card to a "generic" HD 3870.
The back of the box features eleven languages, and a little bit about the bundled software, which I will go over next.
The Bundle
The bundled software for the Asus EAH3870 is quite nice. Foremost, of course, you get the excellent Opposing Fronts. While perhaps not really suitable for a casual gamer, most potential HD 3870 owners out there would love a copy of this WW2 strategy game made by Relic. Besides being a stand-out real-time strategy game, Opposing Fronts also looks great, and compliments the abilities of the HD 3870.
Besides this game, the Asus EAH3870 also comes with a collection of good applications. Of particular personal appreciation, SmartDoctor was a pleasant and easy piece of software to use. This program can further overclock the Asus EAH3870, monitor its temperature, and control its fan. Not sure why there is no shader clock overclocking feature, but anyways, a good program nonetheless. A new arrival into the Asus software collection, GamerOSD, is also included with the HD 3870. This is a light but useful program that can be used to take screenshots, movies, and measure FPS and overclocking efficiency with.
Further rounding out the software bundle are Splendid (a video player) and Video Security Online (which can be used to visually monitor your home remotely).
Beyond software, the Asus HD 3870 comes with: a driver CD, a thick quick-start pamphelt, a leather DVD case, a CrossFire bridge, a S-Video to composite adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, HDTV cable, and a molex-to-PCIE power adapter.
All in all, a very complete bundle.
For this we review, we used the following testing platform:
Luckily, in our Neoseeker labs, we have all the hardware required to put the HD 3870's performance in perspective. This video card's main competition in our tests will be coming from the NVIDIA 8800 GT 512MB and BFG 8800 GT OC 512MB (overclocked). Additionally at this mid-range price-point, for added comparison's sake we have a XFX 8800 GT XXX Alpha Dog Edition 256MB, and a PowerColor HD 3850 Xtreme PCS 512MB. To round out how this card performs against the heavy-hitters, we have a Asus EN8800 GTX, and a HD 2900 XT. We also threw in a popular card - the Asus EN8800 GTS 320MB -- for good measure.
All of our benchmarks are in run in a recently updated Vista.
All of ATI cards used the Catalyst 7.11 drivers. All of NVIDIA cards ran with Forceware 169.12, with the exception of the 8800 GTS 512 card, which used Forceware release 169.06.
Here are the games we benched, with some information on our chosen settings:
Bioshock: For this benchmark, all of the Detail settings were set to 'High'. All of the graphic option switches were set to 'On', with the exception of the following three settings: Vsync, Windowed mode, and Force Global Lighting. We used FRAPS to measure framerate performance. The FRAPS run was 138 seconds, triggered from pulling the switch in the sub at game's beginning. The sub's dive involves many big models moving around, which should strain the GPU's and be a good measure of the game's engine.
Call of Juarez: We used the stand-alone Call of Juarez DX10 benchmarking program for these results. For our AA testing, we used a setting of 2x.
Crysis: These benchmarks were performed using 'fly-by' GPU test found within the single-player pre-release demo version of the game. All graphic settings were on 'Medium.' For AA, we used a setting of 4x. DX10 mode was used.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: This is the first time we used this id FPS shooter as a benchmark. The following settings were used: medium texture qualities, normal lighting quality, high shader effects, high terrian and foliage quality, ultra shader level, and shadows were on.
Unreal Tournament 3: We tested the game using a fly-through of the vechicle capture-the-flag map 'Suspense.'angriLa (map) running for 90 seconds. Details were set to 'High', and a AF setting of 4x was used.
World In Conflict: We used the built-in benchmark of the demo version of this game. We ran the benchmark in DX9 rendering mode, with a 'High' level of quality. For the AA testing, we used a setting of 4x, and a setting of 16x for AF.
If you would like any further information about our benchmark settings, feel free to ask us in the forums.
The less-power hungry, cheaper, 55 nm process HD 3870 beats out its father card, the HD 2900 XT in all of these synthetic benchmarks. I wonder if that hold true for the games?
The Asus EAH3870 does well here but does not seperate itself much above the PowerColor HD 3850, or the 8800 GT 256MB.
The Asus EAH3870 TOP does seem to offer more performance than a HD 2900 XT. For the a price somewhere on the high side of $200, that's pretty good. But unforunately, most eyes on this chart will probably be drawn to the fact that it the 8800 GT seems to offer a bit higher framerates at 1600x1200, with AA on, for the around the same price of this card. The difference isn't huge -- but it's there.
Call of Juarez has always seems to be a 'ATI friendly' game in testing, and this definetly holds true again this time around.
Both the HD 3850 and HD 3870 really shine here, with the Asus EAH3870 TOP coming within a blink of catching the 8800 GTX on the top slot on the chart. The Asus HD 3870 beats out its rival, the BFG 8800 GT OC, with and without AA, in this benchmark -- nice to see.
With AA on, the Asus EAH3870 has a little trouble keeping up with both 8800 GT's in World In Conflict.
If any game is going to bring the HD 3870 down to its knees, it would be Crysis. Unfortunately the Asus EAH3870 TOP does not fair all the well here, even getting beaten out by the XFX 8800 GT 256MB. The poor showing of the HD 3870 here might have a lot to do with Crysis being optimized for NVIDIA cards under 'The Way It's Meant to Be Played' program, but whatever the reason, the 8800 GT's do maintain a healthy lead over the HD 3870 here.
Power Usage
To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we ran a demanding part of 3DMark06.
The 55nm process of the Asus EAH3870 pays dividends here with a nice and low power requirement. Funny to think that this HD 3870 saps a over 100 Watts less than a HD 2900 XT in 'load' conditions. The box requirements state a minimum power supply of 450 Watts -- that seems about right. The Asus HD 3870 TOP has about the power usage numbers as a 8800 GT 512MB.
Conclusion
If the 8800 GT did not exist, then the HD 3870 would be rocking every PC gamer's universe. For around $250, you can get the power previously reserved for video cards in the over-$400 range, not that long ago. For $250 USD, the HD 3870 delivers the performance that generally bests the HD 2900 XT, and is comparable to the 8800 GTX. Not that bad at all! The Asus EAH3870 TOP can deliver a solid gaming experience, for a fair price.
But it's not all roses, because this card's primary competition, the 8800 GT, does exist -- and herein lies the problem for the HD 3870. While the HD 3870 did shine in a few of the benchmarks, such as Call of Juarez, both of our 8800 GT's tested seemed to just out-edge the HD 3870, most of the time. At maximum resolutions with AA, often both 8800 GT cards we tested would have about 10 frames a second advantage over the Asus EAH3870 TOP. Ten frames a second is not a huge deal -- but when two cards are priced fairly similarly, this difference can make or break a choice between two closely-matched cards.
There has been all sorts of stock and price fluctuations recently, for video cards. Whether to go with a Asus EAH3870 TOP might come down to what is available where, and at what price. With a great bundle including an excellent game, the Asus HD 3870 T.O.P would have looked great under any Christmas tree last week. However, whether to go with this video card over another, for many, will probably be down to what price is offered, by what retailer, on any given day.
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