The Atomic branding on the Radeon HD 3870 card just sounds high-end, and we eagerly awaited for it to show us that Sapphire still has what it takes. Sapphire took RV670's GPU and had a green light to play with GPU and memory clocks, and of course, to develop a new cooling system. The reference design is usually good enough to keep the card temperatures at bay, but we and every other enthusiast out there always want better and more efficient cooling.

For the new technology to develop it takes time and a lot of effort, if you want to have something good and revolutionary. Sapphire has taken a shorter route and took Vapor Chamber technology and effectively implemented it to cool down the graphics card, branding it Vapor-X GPU cooling.



The cooler was named Atomic, and the same brand was just passed on to the card, Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic Edition.



The Vapor-X cooler works similar to heatpipe technology, but it is much more advanced, and it uses clean water and a process called water vaporization. In the process of cooling water gets vaporized by heating, and vapor fills the vacuum chamber. The vacuum chamber has low air pressure, which enables water to evaporate much faster. An important role is played by three layers in the vapor chamber, a vaporization wick, a condensation wick and a transportation wick. The GPU and memory are in direct contact with the vacuum chamber and they represent the heat source that heats the vaporization wick. The created vapor then moves freely in all directions toward the colder part of the chamber where it comes in contact with cold parts of cooler air and becomes plain water again. The condensation wick then takes that water and the transportation wick routes it back to the vaporization wick.



The good side of this type of cooling is that the vacuum chamber is only 3mm thick, so it is possible to create efficient single slot cooling, which is better than the reference dual slot heatpipe based cooler. The vacuum chamber covers almost the entire cooler. The only drawback is that the hot air remains inside the case, but that is the price you have to pay when you use a single slot cooling solution.



The front side of the cooler reveals aluminum fins, which are cooled by a small fan and which are in direct contact with the vacuum chamber. The fan is quiet, and the entire cooler is much more effective than the reference one.



Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 is based on the RV670 GPU, which is works at 775MHz for reference cards. It was expected for Sapphire to overclock this card, and they decided that 825MHz is the magical number. This is a boost of just 50MHz, but it is as far as it goes with single slot cooling. We managed to push it all the way to 860MHz, which is a better result, but the card was completely stable only at 845MHz.

The memory is also overclocked and it works at 1200MHz for 512MB of GDDR4, which is not that bad when compared to reference 1125MHz. The card uses Samsung K4U52324QE-BC08 memory chips, which are rated to work at 1200MHz (0.8ns) just as Sapphire decided to clock them. We overclocked the memory all the way to 1300MHz, but we didn't want to push our luck with additional overclocking.


If you intend to use Crossfire with four cards, then Sapphire Atomic is the card for you, since it can only be done with single slot cards, at least for now.



Even if the single slot card gives you enough room to go for the quad Crossfire they still leave the hot air inside the case, while dual slot blows it out of the case, at least in ATI's reference design cooler. That is the only drawback of this single slot cooling solution, so if you decide to plug a few of these cards together, you might want to keep an eye on the case temperature.



Sapphire's Atomic HD 3870 isn't great when you take a look at the card's clocks, but bundle certainly is, so it earned a page for itself.






Bundle

Sapphire's Atomic HD 3870 comes packed in a neat looking, easily transportable, aluminum briefcase which is full of pleasant surprises. We got it all nicely packed in a cardboard box.



You have to keep an eye out for the front side that has a logo on it, since it is very sensitive to touch and can easily be scratched. The logo and the branding are written on some kind of cardboard, which is easily damaged. We would like to see it engraved in the aluminum, but this looks good, also.



The briefcase is certainly good looking, but the inside contents are even better.



The card is nicely protected from all sides, and all you need to know about the card is written on the cardboard which is the first thing, besides the card, that you will see when you open the briefcase.



The briefcase contents also include a three meter long HDMI cable in addition to the DVI-HDMI adapter. The HDMI cable is a nice touch, and as far as we know Sapphire is the only partner that includes it with the graphics card.



An interesting addition is the LED lamp. You get a neat little switch for the neon light lamp, and a lots of software. The full version of 3DMark06, CyberLink PowerDVD 7 and DVD Suite, CD with drivers, and last but not least, the Black Box voucher hidden in the manual.



Two LED neon lights are easily connected and can be placed anywhere inside the case since they come with adhesive straps.








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)
 

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.