Sapphire Radeon HD3850 512MB GDDR3 Dual DVI-I / TVO AGP Graphics Card
- AGP 4X/8X bus interface
- 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
- Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
- OpenGL 2.0 support
- Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
Product Description
Delivering Mayhem to the Mainstream Long thought to be the market of the conservative gamer, the affordable mainstream products, which use to suffer only adequate performance, now experiences a frame rate revival with the SAPPHIRE HD 3850. Built upon the award winning Radeon HD 3850 core, the SAPPHIRE 3850 offers a comprehensive feature-set that eclipses previous and current mainstream offerings. Unleash the enthusiast inside you with support for advanced technologies such as DirectX® 10 and Shader Model 4 support, integrated HDCP support for Blu-ray¿/HD DVD decoding and for extreme enthusiast, Jam a SAPPHIRE HD 3850 into your rig and still have some coin left over to buy that title you have been waiting for!… More >>
Sapphire Radeon HD3850 512MB GDDR3 Dual DVI-I / TVO AGP Graphics Card
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5 comments
John Dowd on December 15, 2009 at 4:58 am
The card requires not one, but two (yes, 2) extra cables from the power supply to the card. My pc had just one such connector left over (after I had added a second disk drive). I ended up making it work by cannibalizing some power connectors from an obsolete pc. I spliced those in with some solder and electrical tape. It wasn’t hard but it was daunting and very annoying. It’s just ridiculous that it demands not one but 2 extra power cables. I didn’t see any warnings about this when I bought the board. The card worked fine except for that glaring flaw.
There’s no good reason why the board cannot get all its power from the connections to the motherboard. I suppose I could have also soldered some wires from the one connector, over to the other. I think the designers just wanted to ensure their board would get enough power if someone comes along and tries to stick it in a system that is already loaded up with components, and the power-supply is not up to the demands, which might then result in them being sued for frying someone’s computer.
SweetDaddy on December 15, 2009 at 5:58 am
SAPPHIRE HD 3850 512MB GDDR3 AGP
Better card Info…
* 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
* AGP 4X/8X bus interface
* 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
* Ring Bus Memory Controller
o Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
* Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
o Shader Model 4.1
o 32-bit floating point texture filtering
o Indexed cube map arrays
o Independent blend modes per render target
o Pixel coverage sample masking
o Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
o Gather4 texture fetching
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
o 320 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Physics processing support
* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
* Anti-aliasing features
o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (ATI CrossFire(tm) configurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
* Texture filtering features
o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
* OpenGL 2.0 support
* ATI Avivo(tm) HD Video and Display Platform
o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
o Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
+ Motion compensation and IDCT
o ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920×1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560×1600 (dual-link DVI)
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048×1536
o Integrated AMD Xilleon(tm) HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs
* ATI PowerPlay(tm)
o Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
o Performance-on-Demand
o Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
o Clock and memory speed throttling
o Voltage switching
o Dynamic clock gating
o Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
1. Some custom resolutions require user configuration
2. HDCP support for playback of protected content requires connection to a HDCP capable display
System Requirement:
* AGP based PC is required with one 4X/8X AGP slot available on the motherboard.
* 1GB or greater system memory for better performance.
* 450Watt or greater power supply with 30Amps on 12 volt with 2×4 power connector recommanded.
* Certified power supplies are recommended. [..]
* DVD playback requires DVD driver
* Blu-ray/HD DVD playback requires Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive and playback software.
V. Szuchon on December 15, 2009 at 8:20 am
When i poped this sucker in i was able to play all my games maxed out (call of duty 4, command and conquer 3, and supreme commander with some very playable framerates). I upgraded from a Geforce 5200 and OMG what a difference, the only bad part is if you have the money go for something a little better, cause this might not be able to cut it with future DirectX10 games. Hope i was helpful.
thersites on December 15, 2009 at 11:16 am
The good news and bad news about this card:
The good news – great card! I bought it as the “last best” videocard for my AGP motherboard – I took the advice on tom’s hardware and got this card. And it raised my performance hugely (my old video card was a 128MB GeForce), with no problems. It’s a little tricky getting the latest drivers (best bet is to go to sapphire tech: [...]), but otherwise no problems.
The bad news is – they don’t really tell you (and the manual is also very cryptic about it), but it turns out it needs _2_ 4-pin power supply connectors fed into it. As my old video card needed _0_ such power supply connectors, this was an issue
. It’s easily remedied by buying power supply splitter cables, which only cost about $4 (look at the ‘people who bought this also bought’ section), but if you don’t order them in advance, and you’re not near a Fry’s, you may have bought this video card and be unable to install it.
A Sapphire user on December 15, 2009 at 11:45 am
Happened to find out the Sapphire card doesn’t natively support for the max resolution of the most common 22″ monitor. You have to settle with the low resolution for the picture ratio to be right. The Sapphire customer support seems to be totally ignorant/arrogant, and can’t provide any information other than “This is your monitor’s issue”. It’s such an experience of frustration that I would say goodbye ever to Sapphire/ATI