Last week Diamond Multimedia launched one of the first 1 gigabyte, overclocked versions of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card. Diamond claims that the performance matches against Nvidia's new GeForce 9xxx series, as well against the Radeon HD 3870 X2. We fire up the Dell 30" to test this claim out at 2560x1600 to see just how the larger frame buffer does on a number of games. We then overclock the card and five you our thoughts!

Quote: "First and foremost, if you're playing at extreme resolutions of 2560x1600 a single ATI Radeon HD 3870 is clearly not going to cut it. It is able to provide playable frame rates in some situations but is bested by the Nvidia 8800 GTS in most of those same situations. When it comes to performance compared to a standard 3870 with 512MB, our 1GB version really didn't show much improvement in our short battery of test, but I believe that the performance is being held back more by the actual GPU than an increase in memory bandwidth and size can help. Our testing at such a high resolution should have given the Diamond 3870 1GB a chance to shine..."



Link: Legit Reviews