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Summary

The following is a summary of the more detailed analysis of the Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB graphics card. For all the in-depth analysis and testing you'd expect from us, be sure to click this link to get all the details!

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Back in November of 2007 AMD released the Radeon HD 3800-series of graphics cards to a mostly positive reaction.  The HD 3870 was the "high end" card meant to compete with NVIDIA's 8800 GT card while the HD 3850 was aimed at the 8600 GTS and other mid-range solutions.  Back then the HD 3870 was a 512MB card and the HD 3850 was 256MB - but times have shifted since then and in an attempt to keep up with increasing competition from NVIDIA in all price ranges we have seen both cards double their frame buffers.  You can now easily find HD 3850 cards with 512MB of memory and today Diamond is the first card vendor to create a 1GB version of the HD 3870.

With the most recent HD 3870 card releases, including the Visiontek review we recently posted, AMD and its partners have revised the cooler to be a bit quieter and slightly more efficient as well. 


The Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB card includes this new cooler that uses a copper heatsinks with heatpipes distributing the energy across an array of fins while the large fan on the back pulls in cooler air from the case, across the heatsink, and out the back of the double slot configuration.

Diamond has overclocked the core speed from the 777 MHz that we first saw with the reference cards up to 830 MHz- that is a 7% increase.  The memory clock actually isn't overclocked at all though; considering that Diamond was trying to sell this card for as low a price as possible it makes sense they wouldn't spring for the overclockable memory while doubling up the amount of it as well.

Pricing and Availability

As of this writing, finding the Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB card is not a problem at all: we have seven vendors listing stock and ready to ship.  The lowest price I can find for it is $259 - and that includes a $40 mail-in rebate.  The BFG 9800 GTX is priced at $310 or so and above and the lowest priced Radeon HD 3870 X2 card I could find comes in at $399 and above.

Obviously then the Diamond HD 3870 1GB card is priced low enough compared to the X2 cards to warrant its existence but the price of the NVIDIA 9800 GTX cards is a little too close for comfort.  The performance advantages of the 9800 GTX might just push people to spend the extra cash, or even save some cash and hit up the $175 HD 3870 512MB card.

Final Thoughts

The Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB graphics card would make a good choice for just about any user, but it probably isn't the best one.  The performance differences between it and the 512MB version of the same GPU that sells for much less are pretty small unless you are playing a ton of Bioshock or World in Conflict.  The NVIDIA 9800 GTX also makes choosing this card difficult since you can spend a bit more money and get some much better gaming performance in a whole host of titles.  In the end though we are thankful to see companies like Diamond taking risks like this and trying to improve and expand on AMD's current crop of cards even if it doesn't pan out as well as they (and we) had hoped.

Be sure to use our pricing engine to find the best prices on NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and anything else you might need:

Click here for the Detailed Review