Radeon 3870 almost here
JUST IN CASE you haven't had enough of leaked card pictures, the official pictures of the new Radeon HD 3870 have turned up, along with the final specs of the card's technology.
Despite being based on the same technology as the HD 2900 series, ATI is taking the opportunity to iterate its product naming so as to give the impression of, you know, actual technological progress. It will also help ATI to avoid comparisons to Nvidia in the mainstream press, which has been long acquainted with the traditional numerical schemes of both the main players.
The base configuration of the 3870 has an 825MHz core and 2400MHz memory clock. It's got a dual-slot cooler which does look like a slightly different design from the one we're used to seeing.
You can find the pictures here. µ
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When is the release date thats what i want to know. Is it with AMD 790 on nov 19th.

The link goes to Techpower up, there are a buncha ppl there not reading the INQ, they think the 3870 is no diff than the 2900.
Correction......3850
This numbering is STILL GAY
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sHADER mODEL 4.1 , However PCIe 2.0 Compliant means Bandwidth actually is....? X Files Till We Know.

Signed:thomasXstewart.
nice card, but how long is it going to take to get a game that can actually make the card work? after the 2900pro and the 8800 do they really need to make faster parts? why not make them smaller cooler more efficient?
I'm sorry, I guess I'm slow...what numbering "scheme" is that?

To me these numbers seem compeltely random... were they generated by the RTC?

Personally I cnanot see why the numbering "scheme" would be 3870 OR 3850...

I suggest a new "scheme" "Radeon HD 1-800-DAMMIT-MARKETING"

This way it can really diversify from Nvidia's offering and avoid a direct numbering "scheme" comparison.
DirectX 10.0 is VISTA ONLY. And DirectX 10.1 will be introduced Vista SP1 onwards. Games making use of the improvements of DX 10.1 will arrive late next year at the earliest. We will see atleast one new generation of cards by then. For the vast majority of us using WinXP, DX10+ does NOTHING, thank you.
PCIe 2.0 is useful for the super-dumb-rich guys using quadfire/triSLI etc. In single card configs theres no use for all the added bandwidth. Support for blu-ray/HD-DVD decoding is perhaps the only remotely useful thing. But i dont see many people using one of these cards in an HTPC. Decoding is far more useful on a small-form factor, low end, passive cooled card which is more likely to be used on an HTPC along with a low-power CPU which might not have the horsepower to do the decoding through software.
PCI-E 2.0 for the super dumb rich people?
smoking stuff again? the fact that it gives 250W through the slot and the new cards will not need a separate PSU lead to get their juice is not important to you?
the fact that the card needs 130W to run at full load is not an important feature to you?
you chose to focus on the check box features and ignored the important things... 
I sense a fanboy.