Power Color made a 1GB version Radeon HD 3850, and we are pleased to share with you first pictures and results of this rather interesting card. The card uses only eigh Qimonda HYB18H1G321AF-11 DDR3 chips and this is the first card wit 1GB done with eight chips. All previous 1GB cards we've seen had 16 chips to reach 1GB.
This time it is possible to place a whole Gigabyte on the same side of PCB. No changes in PCB design were made for new memory modules, therefore the HD 3850 1GB card has the same PCB and uses custom ZEROtherm cooling. We already saw this cooler on HD 3850 512MB PSC Extreme card we tested two months ago here.
GPU works at 720MHz but the memory works on default 830MHz. Proven ZEROtherm cooler is used for GPU cooling but memory chips are cooled only by one passive block.
Qimonda GDDR3 memory with 1Gb densities can also work at 900MHz and therefore we expect some good overclocking .
