Gigabyte shows off 3850
Not OEM shocka
AS ATI PREPARES to make its big reveal on its latest graphics line, images of boards are leaking their way onto the internet, as confidential information appears wont to do in this day and age.
New photos published on TechConnect here show the Radeon HD 3850 sitting next to its strikingly similar-looking brother, the GeForce 8800 GT - both original designs by the Gigabyte team, and packing a decent Zalman heatsink on top, infinitely preferable to the default cooling solutions the red and green teams ship with their cards.
Expect more photos, benchmarks and other such miscellany to flood onto the web-waves before ATI's launch day. It seems that nothing can stand in the way of the enthusiasm of hardware, er, enthusiasts for publishing NDA information. µ
Comments
Power Play
Lots more caps and vregs on the GT..The used Zalman is damn Old
The Cooler on the Cards is actually an over 3 year old model from Zalman and even the cheapest one, the VF700ALCU. Its performance wasn't enough to keep a x1800xt stable, you needed the VF900 for it. Its performance was good in old R300 Times when it hit the streets first time, but nowadays its acutally one of the worse coolers especially as it is twoslot while the default cooler ist only singleslot for this card.The X1950XTX Cooler is also more silent by a good margin and has a lot more cooling Capacity, they should have gone for something similar to that.
There are also cheaper all Aluminium Solutions that deliver equal or better performance and low noise, like that what Palit used on the X1950pro Extreme or Powercolor uses on HD2600XT. But of course everything where Zalman stands on must be good no matter how old, so from marketing point of view it was a sensible decision by Gigabyte to bundle the Card with this old VF700ALCU.
yes giz, and...?
is your point that this is a good or bad thing?if u read the reviews hear, i seem to remember them saying that the caps are all nasty, in that u can adjust voltages and stuff on the fly thru software, like u can in the red card?!
It's a 2900 series card!
Doesn't that fact that Gigabytes part number for it, GV-RX2950P512, tell you that it's a HD2950 Pro?@giz
@giz:ati uses digital PWM while nvidia still uses analog (if I remember correctly!)