Back in November, ATI unleashed its Radeon HD 3850 – a best of class GPU which offers full DX10.1 support, hardware video acceleration at a price of fewer than 180 bones. I was impressed then and still feel it’s one of the better video card values going right now. It clearly handed NVIDIA’s 8600-series it’s hind-end and still continues to sell well by all reasonable measurements.

Since Sapphire is ATIs premier board partner and in fact helps make ATI-branded cards for ATI, it’s a show-in that it was one of the first out of the starting gates with an HD 3850. As you may know, the default clock rates for this offering are 670MHz on the GPU core and 1.65GHz (825 MHz DDR) for the RAM speed. This leaves some rather interesting overclocking potential as the GPU is really the same one that’s in the HD 3870; however, has been down clocked.

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