Visiontek HD 3870 Graphics Card
The Visiontek HD 3870 is the graphics card that is affordable and a high end graphics card that is perfect for extreme gaming or multimedia use.
Ease of Use, Performance: 22/25, Look & Feel: 24/25,
Features 24/25, How much I enjoy 22/25
Total: 92/100
The Visiontek Radeon HD 3870 is a high end graphics card at affordable prices with the top of the line features; 512 MB GDDR 4 memory, PCI Express 2.0 & 1.0 support, Direct X10.1 and Shader Model 4.0 support. The graphics card has two DVI-I connections and one S-Video out for connecting two monitors while gaming or watching the current high definition Blu-Ray discs.
Visiontek has some great graphics cards and the latest high definition 3870 cards are the cream of the crop. Okay, enough sounding like a commercial, the card is good but how good compared to the same priced NVIDIA 8800 GT graphics card. The latest cards for ATI to come out are the HD 3870 X2 with some really great specifications but also the price is way up there at about $500. The Radeon HD 3870 comes in way under that at about $250 with some impressive gaming frame rates and scores in benchmark tests.
The Visiontek HD 3870 comes with the card which takes two slots in your case, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, the rear connector to S-video adapter, a rear connection to Component adapter, one CrossFire Bridge and the drivers on a CD. The card itself has a very good and large heat sink fan assembly that means a better cooling solution for this intense graphics card.
I tested the Visiontek against a Zotac NVIDIA 8800 GT and saw very comparable scores and frame rates in gaming and also watched some movies and internet video with very good results. The Visiontek graphics card performed just as well as the Zotac 8800 GT in all the tests with some frame rates in some resolution better and some worse.
At regular clock speeds the card did very well but I did not try any overclocking on the Visiontek card. With frame rates and benchmark scores that were certainly on a par with the NVIDIA 8800 GT I see no reason to push the power consumption or heat in my system. I have read some good overclocking results on the internet with this card but really don’t see much of a reason to pursue going faster when my system will probably not do much better with it.