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Power Usage

The VisionTek HD 3870 has reasonable power usage -- maybe thought it would have been a little bit lower, but nothing too alarming here.  Running a pair of these cards would require a 550 Watt power supply at least -- while running 3 or more using the new CrossFireX system, would require a very serious power supply.

Overclocking

The nice cooler on this video card would inspire belief in its suitability for overclocking, so we spent a fair bit of time seeing what this baby could do in our lab.

Using Rivatuner V2.06 we set the fan control to manual, at let it run at the 100% level. While this is helpful for overclocking, the fan does get fairly loud running at 100%, so it is probably not suitable for every day operation at this level. Perhaps 85% might better suit the overclocker in you -- but it depends on how sensitive your hearing is, and how far you want to push your video card. At default speeds the fan is not very loud at all, and barely noticeable.

After many trials and tribulations, we managed to get the VisionTek HD 3870 runnning rock-solid with a core clock of 884 and a memory clock of 1292 (2596 MHz). (Our stability was with our regular suite of benchmarks: about an hour's worth of intense demand on the GPU.) This card must feature that new BIOS that I heard about -- early HD 3870 cards where limited to a clock speed of 862 MHz.

This overclock isn't too shabby -- while not an incredible overclock in of itself beyond the standard HD 3870 clock speeds of 777 / 1126, as HD 3870's go, this is a very good overclock -- although I'm surprised I wasn't able to push the memory a bit further.

All-in-all, the VisionTek HD 3870 is a good overclocker.