RadeonHd3850
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Flaws found in 15,000+ Diamond video cards
There was a time -- back in the mid-'90s -- when Diamond Multimedia was tops in the burgeoning graphics acceleration game. Those days are apparently long gone (and look to stay that way) thanks to recent quality assurance issues affecting many of the company's 512MB Radeon HD 3800 series cards. Those manufactured between January and July of this year are said to suffer problems ranging from a complete lack of power management to plain 'ol "poor soldering." Alienware saw a 10-percent failure rate and shipped back its entire stock, canceling any further dealings with the company. For the record, Diamond doesn't actually manufacture these, acting as a reseller for GeCube, but perhaps was lax in its testing and now is perhaps being lax in its disclosure. The company has indicated that not only is there no problem with its products, its gone so far as to state that "Diamond manufactures the most reliable graphics cards in the industry and our customers' satisfaction is our first priority." Alienware would beg to differ.
ATI Radeon HD 3800 series benchmarked: "ATI should be truly proud"
Now that they're out, we bet you're wondering about the performance of that pair of mid-range, ATI Radeon cards announced this morning. According to TG Daily and just about everyone else, the Nvidia GeForce 8800GT is still the best performing midrange graphics card on the market (for a few bucks more, if you can find it). But if you like the performance of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, you'll be happy with your lower priced, but similar performing Radeon HD 3870 according to HotHardware. They go on to call the HD 3850 "quite strong" when compared against mid-range cards like the Radeon 2600 XT and GeoForce 8600 GTS. In fact, Custom PC says that the 3850 "blows both of these cards away." Thanks to the new 55nm manufacturing process, both cards kept power consumption, temperature, and noise levels "way down" in comparison. Lots to love from the benchmarking gang. Only thing left to do now is to track them down for that $179 and $219 MSRP. P.S. If you spot more benchmarks let us know so we can round the critters up.Update: Round-up now posted after the break.
AMD launches ATI Radeon HD 3800 series for budget gamers
Here we go, AMD just announced the immediate availability of their ATI Radeon HD 3800 series of GPUs. Four days earlier than predicted. According to AMD, these are the world's first to support DirectX 10.1, 55nm process technology, and tri and quad multi-GPU support with ATI CrossFireX. Out today are the $179 Radeon HD 3850 with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and $219 Radeon HD 3870 with 512MB of GDDR4. Now, how 'bout giving us the Phenom processor AMD, and we'll call it a day?[Via I4U]
