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Page 1
Intro:
It has been a very long time since a graphics card has passed by the review bench of ASE Labs. Sapphire steps up to the plate with their release of the Radeon HD3870 Toxic Edition that hopes to earn some of your hard earned cash. With AMD's support of open source, the ATI partners are in a good position to conqueror the Linux market and the future is bright. Sapphire is the biggest producer of ATI cards and we will see how their product performs.
About Sapphire:
RV670:
The RV670 is the codename for the 3800 series GPU. There are a number of improvements over the previous model. The RV670 is built on a 55 nanometer manufacturing process which is the first product to do so. Shrinking the feature size allows for better power consumption and less expensive parts due to fewer materials being used. The older generation R600 parts were based on an 80nm process and featured 700 million transistors. The RV670 drops the count down to a devilish 666 million.
The RV670 supports the latest de facto standards such as DirectX 10.1 (the absolute latest which is only available on Windows Vista) as well as OpenGL 2.0. The GPU also supports HDMI as well as HDCP (also for use on Vista or TVs that require it). In that area, the RV670 has added a Unified Video Decoder engine to the GPU to allow full hardware acceleration when dealing with any HD format.
Aside from the new fancy multimedia features, AMD has sought to improve the power management capabilities of its cards and this GPU features PowerPlay technology. This was previously seen in notebooks, but even desktop CPUs have notebook power saving features now (Core 2). Unlike previous attempts at power management, this does not require any driver interaction. The GPU itself can sense what functions it needs to perform and actually shut down unused parts of the GPU. This combined with the die shrink means that the cards built on this technology should be very power friendly.
The highend model of the RV670 is the Radeon HD 3870 which has 512MB of GDDR4 clocked at 1125MHz with a 256-bit memory bus and a core clock of 775MHz. The Toxic edition pumps that up a bit.
Box:
The Sapphire retail box is black and blue. Notice all the product logos on the box as well, that should give you an idea of what will come inside the packaging.
Specs:
Quite a list of features, but you should be aware that this card is factory overcocked. Not listed in the specs, the product carries a 2 year warranty which is fine for a VGA card.
Intro:
It has been a very long time since a graphics card has passed by the review bench of ASE Labs. Sapphire steps up to the plate with their release of the Radeon HD3870 Toxic Edition that hopes to earn some of your hard earned cash. With AMD's support of open source, the ATI partners are in a good position to conqueror the Linux market and the future is bright. Sapphire is the biggest producer of ATI cards and we will see how their product performs.
About Sapphire:
Quote
Pioneers in a new era of how data is displayed and games are played, Sapphire shepherds the performance oriented with ground-breaking solutions to an environment that remains in a constant state of flux and ultimate evolution. For over ten years Sapphire has held true to its unwavering commitment, the commitment to deliver the most feature rich and soundly engineered products. Because of Sapphire's firm position on achieving excellence with each product that leaves our ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified factories, you can rest assured that your customers will recognize YOUR commitment to selling only the highest of quality components.
"Sapphire is ATI's largest and best performing partner World Wide" Dave Orton, CEO ATI
Since ATI announced its manufacturing & distribution relationships with ODMs and AiBs in June of 2001, SAPPHIRE has been THE key ATI Graphics Boards Supplier worldwide and now stands poised and ready to capture the mainboard audience of those who seek a stable platform for their mission critical operations.
Captured within the circuitry of each of SAPPHIRE's graphic cards and mainboards can be found the collective feedback from generations of enthusiasts in every market niche. Brought to life through performance oriented innovation and an emphasis on quality control, SAPPHIRE designs, manufactures and distributes the most complete range of ATI video boards and mainboards--from the mainstream products that afford the casual user the opportunity to enjoy enriched graphics and affordable platform solutions to the state-of-the-art technological marvels that drive fantasies to before unattainable thresholds of realism, and offer the pinnacle of stability and performance! SAPPHIRE refuses to compromise quality by cutting corners at the expense of its customers experience with their products. All ATI board designs undergo a stringent layout inspection by our staff of engineers to guarantee that they represent the usual high-quality image of ATI original boards. We also enjoy the resources of a highly innovative technical department that layout complex designs to accommodate different market niches as they arise. SAPPHIRE ATI video boards have long been the reliable choice for a great number of OEMs and large System Integrators in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America based largely on our ability to meet a fast paced technical markets advancements as well as our means to produce large quantities of product.
All SAPPHIRE ATI video boards are manufactured under 100% ATI production criteria including QC and outgoing system. Our monthly video board production capacity can reach a lofty 1.8 million and often topples this landmark figure. Our factory has always been the major manufacturer on ATI boards for most of the top ten tier 1 OEMs worldwide. With this background, you should undoubtedly be guaranteed of the impeccable quality, production capacity and product reliability of all ATI video boards and mainboards from SAPPHIRE. Be they business oriented or something just off center of the crosshairs, Sapphire has a solution for you and we look forward to an exciting and prosperous relationship with you!
RV670:
The RV670 is the codename for the 3800 series GPU. There are a number of improvements over the previous model. The RV670 is built on a 55 nanometer manufacturing process which is the first product to do so. Shrinking the feature size allows for better power consumption and less expensive parts due to fewer materials being used. The older generation R600 parts were based on an 80nm process and featured 700 million transistors. The RV670 drops the count down to a devilish 666 million.
The RV670 supports the latest de facto standards such as DirectX 10.1 (the absolute latest which is only available on Windows Vista) as well as OpenGL 2.0. The GPU also supports HDMI as well as HDCP (also for use on Vista or TVs that require it). In that area, the RV670 has added a Unified Video Decoder engine to the GPU to allow full hardware acceleration when dealing with any HD format.
Aside from the new fancy multimedia features, AMD has sought to improve the power management capabilities of its cards and this GPU features PowerPlay technology. This was previously seen in notebooks, but even desktop CPUs have notebook power saving features now (Core 2). Unlike previous attempts at power management, this does not require any driver interaction. The GPU itself can sense what functions it needs to perform and actually shut down unused parts of the GPU. This combined with the die shrink means that the cards built on this technology should be very power friendly.
The highend model of the RV670 is the Radeon HD 3870 which has 512MB of GDDR4 clocked at 1125MHz with a 256-bit memory bus and a core clock of 775MHz. The Toxic edition pumps that up a bit.
Box:
The Sapphire retail box is black and blue. Notice all the product logos on the box as well, that should give you an idea of what will come inside the packaging.
Specs:
- 512MB GDDR4
- 256-bit GDDR4 memory interface
- Blue PCB
- Core/Memory Clock - 800 / 1152MHz
- PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
- DirectX® 10.1 support
- CrossFire X support
- ATI PowerPlay
- Hardware processed 1080p video playback of Blu-ray and HD DVDs
- HDMI with 5.1 surround sound audio
- 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
- PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
- 256-bit GDDR4 memory interface
- Ring Bus Memory Controller
- Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
- Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
- Shader Model 4.1
- 32-bit floating point texture filtering
- Indexed cube map arrays
- Independent blend modes per render target
- Pixel coverage sample masking
- Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
- Gather4 texture fetching
- Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
- 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
Quite a list of features, but you should be aware that this card is factory overcocked. Not listed in the specs, the product carries a 2 year warranty which is fine for a VGA card.
Page 2
Parts:
Aside from the card, there are a number of goodies that Sapphire bundles with the card. A full version of 3DMark06 is included. 3DMark06 is a Windows DirectX benchmark. PowerDVD is also included for Windows as well as the DVD Suite from the same company, CyberLink. The driver cd contains Windows drivers and utilities, but the real gem is that the package contains a coupon for The Black Box which was to be released but never was. It includes games such as Portal. It can be redeemed by logging onto Steam. Aside from the software, you get a DVI to HDMI converter, a DVI to VGA converter, a HDMI cable, a 4-pin to 6-pin Molex connector and some video out cables. The bundle also includes a Crossfire connection.
Sapphire's bundle is very impressive considering that the last few graphics cards didn't come with anything.
Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Toxic:
STOP! Remember to connect power to the graphics card or else it won't work! Not only that, the cable extension shown is the wrong type. Somehow I don't think this will be a problem for the target market.
The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Toxic uses a single slot cooler which I happen to like much better than the dual slot solution due to the added weight and the space taken up. The theme for the Toxic edition is the Vapor-X. Vapor-X is basically a better version of a heatpipe, the same principles are at work. A phase change happens to draw heat away and then cools and the process starts again. Vapor-X actually uses water, but it brings the pressure to lower than normal so the boiling point is less. The point of this system is to keep the card cool at a reasonable noise level.
The Toxic sports a cool blue PCB and a nice black heatsink as the labelling on the package suggests. The video card is accented with a silver heatsink on the back of the card for the RAM (on the top side).
This card is fairly standard in that it supports two DVI connections and a TV out connection. What isn't standard is that it supports HDMI with HDCP which I'll never use. HDCP is one of those 'features' that attempts to take your rights away. Tough. HDMI also means that this card actually has a sound processor built-in. It doesn't use a passthrough. I couldn't test the HDMI, though.
The back of the card contains the 6-pin video power connector. Older generation cards used a load of power, but the die shrink combined with the power saving technology makes this card run cooler and less power hungry. Everyone is going green.
The card itself is fairly long and moderately heavy. It isn't heavier than the dual slot cooling cards I have used (actually, it is lighter). Just make sure the length of the card will work in your system. It works fine in any of mine.
The back of the card contains the various certifications and markings. It is RoHS which means it is greenly made. The four screws holding the heatsink on the back-bottom of the card portrude a tiny bit so it won't do any harm to any other cards in your system.
Parts:
Aside from the card, there are a number of goodies that Sapphire bundles with the card. A full version of 3DMark06 is included. 3DMark06 is a Windows DirectX benchmark. PowerDVD is also included for Windows as well as the DVD Suite from the same company, CyberLink. The driver cd contains Windows drivers and utilities, but the real gem is that the package contains a coupon for The Black Box which was to be released but never was. It includes games such as Portal. It can be redeemed by logging onto Steam. Aside from the software, you get a DVI to HDMI converter, a DVI to VGA converter, a HDMI cable, a 4-pin to 6-pin Molex connector and some video out cables. The bundle also includes a Crossfire connection.
Sapphire's bundle is very impressive considering that the last few graphics cards didn't come with anything.
Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Toxic:
STOP! Remember to connect power to the graphics card or else it won't work! Not only that, the cable extension shown is the wrong type. Somehow I don't think this will be a problem for the target market.
The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Toxic uses a single slot cooler which I happen to like much better than the dual slot solution due to the added weight and the space taken up. The theme for the Toxic edition is the Vapor-X. Vapor-X is basically a better version of a heatpipe, the same principles are at work. A phase change happens to draw heat away and then cools and the process starts again. Vapor-X actually uses water, but it brings the pressure to lower than normal so the boiling point is less. The point of this system is to keep the card cool at a reasonable noise level.
The Toxic sports a cool blue PCB and a nice black heatsink as the labelling on the package suggests. The video card is accented with a silver heatsink on the back of the card for the RAM (on the top side).
This card is fairly standard in that it supports two DVI connections and a TV out connection. What isn't standard is that it supports HDMI with HDCP which I'll never use. HDCP is one of those 'features' that attempts to take your rights away. Tough. HDMI also means that this card actually has a sound processor built-in. It doesn't use a passthrough. I couldn't test the HDMI, though.
The back of the card contains the 6-pin video power connector. Older generation cards used a load of power, but the die shrink combined with the power saving technology makes this card run cooler and less power hungry. Everyone is going green.
The card itself is fairly long and moderately heavy. It isn't heavier than the dual slot cooling cards I have used (actually, it is lighter). Just make sure the length of the card will work in your system. It works fine in any of mine.
The back of the card contains the various certifications and markings. It is RoHS which means it is greenly made. The four screws holding the heatsink on the back-bottom of the card portrude a tiny bit so it won't do any harm to any other cards in your system.
Page 3
Testing:
All testing on ASE Labs is done with the current version of Ubuntu (8.04 at the time of this writing). The Toxic was testing with the Catalyst 8.4 drivers (latest as of this review) from the Ubuntu repositories and then the Catalyst Control Center was installed. Testing was done on an Asus P5B Deluxe with a Core 2 Duo E6420. 2GB of PC2-8500 Ballistix Tracer and an 80GB Maxtor hard drive were used. Unfortunately, the card I was testing the Toxic against didn't want to function correctly in Linux. The MSI Geforce 8600GTS refused to use Direct Rendering which made it slow and painful. I've noticed huge problems with that series of card and it is a shame that it doesn't work correctly in Linux. Thankfully the Sapphire card works easily in Linux by installing the drivers told in the driver manager. Really, Linux is getting easier and easier all the time.
The AMD Catalyst Control Center for Linux is really lacking compared to the Nvidia settings manager. I'm sure that will change as newer and better drivers are released. Remember that I'm using the FGLRX driver so this is a non-free binary blob. If you want a truly free and open driver, the radeonhd driver should be completed sooner or later. It is being written by the Novell team and once it is fully ready, it will probably take the center stage over fglrx. For now, you are stuck with a binary blob for 3D support.
Once the fglrx driver was installed, I quickly enabled Compiz Fusion which enabled without a hitch. Getting desktop effects on Linux is very easy and most cards are now support. There is no reason not to try it out for yourself. 2D rendering on the card is superb as it has always been with ATI graphics cards. Unfortunately, you won't get the benefit of the UVD until the driver for Linux gets updated. The fglrx driver does not support Crossfire, yet.
How about some gaming? I quickly fire up Nexuiz 2.4 and proceeded to testing it out. Using the highest settings possible, the game looks absolutely great. It is totally free and open game.
As you can see, the game supports all the latest graphics technologies and even with this card, performance at 1920x1200 at full details settings chopped during game play at certain points. In my benchmarks, the card averaged about 45FPS. If you drop to normal settings, the card screams though at 110FPS. Nexuiz is proof that an open game can be fun and look good.
Now how about some retail gaming? I used Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and did some testing on it as well. Using the highest details settings at 1920x1200, the game was pushing 48FPS which is very impressive for all the particle explosions and such. At low settings the game played at 90FPS at the same resolution.
If I played with the 8600GTS, it would be about twice as slow due to the indirect rendering so I didn't bother doing formal benchmarks. Unfortunately, I don't have any other card comparable to the 3870 Toxic, so this will be the new baseline for all graphics reviews from this day. Performance of the 3870 Toxic should be around the 8800GT 512MB edition and a bit faster than the 9600GT as well.
Conclusion:
The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 512MB Toxic edition is a truly fast card that includes a very impressive bundles. The going price for the card is around $190 from Newegg. At this price it is right around where the competition is (the 8800GT). The difference is that the Sapphire bundle includes much more software and even a great gaming package. Linux support is easy and included with no extra charge. Why wouldn't you buy the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Toxic if you are looking for a new graphics card? You wouldn't... This card is my new favorite.
I'd like to thank Don from Sapphire for supplying this card for review.
Testing:
All testing on ASE Labs is done with the current version of Ubuntu (8.04 at the time of this writing). The Toxic was testing with the Catalyst 8.4 drivers (latest as of this review) from the Ubuntu repositories and then the Catalyst Control Center was installed. Testing was done on an Asus P5B Deluxe with a Core 2 Duo E6420. 2GB of PC2-8500 Ballistix Tracer and an 80GB Maxtor hard drive were used. Unfortunately, the card I was testing the Toxic against didn't want to function correctly in Linux. The MSI Geforce 8600GTS refused to use Direct Rendering which made it slow and painful. I've noticed huge problems with that series of card and it is a shame that it doesn't work correctly in Linux. Thankfully the Sapphire card works easily in Linux by installing the drivers told in the driver manager. Really, Linux is getting easier and easier all the time.
The AMD Catalyst Control Center for Linux is really lacking compared to the Nvidia settings manager. I'm sure that will change as newer and better drivers are released. Remember that I'm using the FGLRX driver so this is a non-free binary blob. If you want a truly free and open driver, the radeonhd driver should be completed sooner or later. It is being written by the Novell team and once it is fully ready, it will probably take the center stage over fglrx. For now, you are stuck with a binary blob for 3D support.
Once the fglrx driver was installed, I quickly enabled Compiz Fusion which enabled without a hitch. Getting desktop effects on Linux is very easy and most cards are now support. There is no reason not to try it out for yourself. 2D rendering on the card is superb as it has always been with ATI graphics cards. Unfortunately, you won't get the benefit of the UVD until the driver for Linux gets updated. The fglrx driver does not support Crossfire, yet.
How about some gaming? I quickly fire up Nexuiz 2.4 and proceeded to testing it out. Using the highest settings possible, the game looks absolutely great. It is totally free and open game.
As you can see, the game supports all the latest graphics technologies and even with this card, performance at 1920x1200 at full details settings chopped during game play at certain points. In my benchmarks, the card averaged about 45FPS. If you drop to normal settings, the card screams though at 110FPS. Nexuiz is proof that an open game can be fun and look good.
Now how about some retail gaming? I used Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and did some testing on it as well. Using the highest details settings at 1920x1200, the game was pushing 48FPS which is very impressive for all the particle explosions and such. At low settings the game played at 90FPS at the same resolution.
If I played with the 8600GTS, it would be about twice as slow due to the indirect rendering so I didn't bother doing formal benchmarks. Unfortunately, I don't have any other card comparable to the 3870 Toxic, so this will be the new baseline for all graphics reviews from this day. Performance of the 3870 Toxic should be around the 8800GT 512MB edition and a bit faster than the 9600GT as well.
Conclusion:
The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 512MB Toxic edition is a truly fast card that includes a very impressive bundles. The going price for the card is around $190 from Newegg. At this price it is right around where the competition is (the 8800GT). The difference is that the Sapphire bundle includes much more software and even a great gaming package. Linux support is easy and included with no extra charge. Why wouldn't you buy the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Toxic if you are looking for a new graphics card? You wouldn't... This card is my new favorite.
I'd like to thank Don from Sapphire for supplying this card for review.