Index
Benchmarking
Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 is a factory overclocked HD 3870 card with single slot cooling solution. It works at 825MHz for the core and 1200MHz for memory (2400MHz effective). Because of the higher clocks it can easily beat the reference HD 3870, but it is still not enough to fight Nvidia's 8800 GT. It is a unique card with interesting single slot cooling design, Atomic Vapor-X cooler. The dimensions makes it more interesting for people who want an HD 3870 card but don't have enough room for a big dual slot cooling card. In addition to that it is important to mention that it is more efficient in cooling the RV670 GPU.
Testbed
Motherboard:
EVGA 680i SLI (EVGA)
Processor:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition (Intel)
Memory:
OCZ FlexXLC PC2 9200 5-5-5-18 (OCZ)
na testu CL5-5-5-15-CR2T 1066MHz at 2.2V
PSU:
OCZ Silencer 750 Quad Black (OCZ)
Hard disk:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB SATA (Seagate)
CPU-Cooler:
Freezer 7 Pro (Artic Cooling)
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 12 PWM
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 8 PWM
Futuremark testing
In synthetic tests Atomic HD 3870 did a great job, it even managed to outperform the 8800 GT in 3DMark 03. The Atomic edition gets a certain boost from 50MHz GPU and 75MHz memory overclock. We pushed it even further to 845MHz for the GPU and 1300MHz for the memory and that card is labeled as Sapphire Atomic HD3870 OC.
We had hoped that it would manage to battle the 8800 GT in games like it did in 3DMark's, but unfortunately, that didn't happen. The Atomic did outperform the reference HD 3870, but 8800 GT has remained unbeaten in this duel.
Games
At lower resolutions, Atomic's clock boost is clearly visible. It didn't manage to do as well as it did in 3DMark's, but it is still better than the reference HD 3870. On higher resolutions the difference is small and barely noticeable. Further overclocking made the Atomic version show its true face.
World in Conflict game set at maximum details doesn't give a lot of breathing room for a graphics card. The Atomic edition managed to squeeze into the first place, but only at 1024x768. To turn on the antialiasing and aniso filtering means to lose on performance. How much you care about eye candy is up to you. With less details we managed to get a better frame rate, but even then and at a higher resolution Nvidia managed to be much better.
Conclusion
No matter how Sapphire tries to make a hero out of the HD 3870 card, Atomic is still based on the RV670 GPU, which is no match for the G92 GPU of the 8800 GT card. But even then the difference is not that huge when you consider that the Atomic card is cheaper, has full HDMI with audio, and that you get a three meter long HDMI cable.
Atomic HD 3870 is a single slot cooling solution card with a cooler that is much better and quieter then reference, and the idle temperatures are the same. Atomic's specially designed cooler is based on vapor chamber technology and managed to be 7 degrees cooler under load than the reference cooler. If you need space, and you don't like the fact that dual slot cooling solution covers the next slot on you motherboard, Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 is definitely the card for you .
With plenty of add-ons and software that you get with the card, don't forget the nice aluminum briefcase that can be used for something else when you place the Atomic card in your system. You might want to keep an eye out for green peace agents if they see you with that briefcase, since they might suspect that you are trying to get rid of the radioactive material.
We can sincerely recommend the Sapphire HD 3870 Atomic Edition for gaming, as well as for multimedia purposes.
