Sapphire Technology has announced its Radeon HD 3800 series. For now, there will be only two cards, a Radeon HD 3870 and a Radeon HD 3850. Sapphire is preparing a passively cooled 3850, which will probably be a part of its "Ultimate" series, and we wrote about it here.

The two models that are available at launch are Sapphire HD 3870 with 512MB of GDDR4 memory, and Sapphire HD 3850 with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. Both of these cards come with reference cooling and reference clocks, so HD 3870 ended up clocked at 775MHz for the core and 1125MHz (2.25GHz effective) for memory. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 comes clocked at 670MHz for the core and 1.66GHz for memory. Both of the cards support PCI-Express 2.0, DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1.

Our favorite European price search engine, Geizhals, listed Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 for €194,78 while the Radeon HD 3850 with 256MB of memory costs €144,80; which is also the lowest price when compared to other partners. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 with 512MB of memory will cost you €164,40. Geizhals even lists Sapphire's passive Radeon HD 3850 Ultimate with 512MB of GDDR3 memory for €189,66 which is a bit high since you can buy Radeon HD 3870 for a little bit more. However,if you appreciate silence then this is the only passive HD3800 series card on the market, at least for now.