Sapphire HD 3870 Atomic Edition is a single slot card, but you shouldn’t dismiss it right away. We’re about to share our first impressions with you, and you should know that Atomic cooler is the thing that makes this card really special; and it performs really well. Vapor-X technology has proven to be the real deal. We'll talk about this more in the actual review, but you should know that we measured 82 degrees Celsius on the GPU core, whereas using the reference cooler we hit 90 degrees Celsius.
The card is silent but we don't like the fact that the hot air stays in the case, a direct result of the cooler being single slot. So, as long as you're not using four of these babies in CrossFire mode, you can rest assured that you won't fry anything inside your case.
Atomic HD 3870 runs at pre-overclocked to 825MHz, which is faster than reference cards by 50MHz.
512MB of GDDR4 runs at 2400MHz (DDR), whereas the reference memory runs at 2250MHz. With the card Sapphire ships a lot of goodies, including 3 meters of HDMI cable, a thing we haven’t seen any manufacturer ship so far. All of this comes in a neat little aluminum case.
The card’s initial results outperform the reference card’s result, and you see that it scored 11060 marks in 3DMark06. We’ll soon post a more detailed follow up, so stay tuned.
