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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.