From 32 Shaders to 112 Shaders Finally

Finally one of my dreams met with reality; Playing all the games out there with all the eye candies at high resolutions... A High end VGA card was a luxurious item back in 2007. Offerings from ATi couldn't give a neck to neck fight to nVidia's stronger counterparts. Finally ATi came up with a real competitor "The RV770" which brought as much as twice the performance of the not much successful predecessor R600. nVidia went haywire from seeing unexpected success of the RV770. That was the start of the flooding of the VGA market. We could see at least one VGA card once a week be it ATi or nVidia. The price point of so called High-End VGAs were falling to previous mid-range or sometimes Low-End cards' price points.

w00t!.. The most popular High End VGA; The8800GT that took enthusiasts' hearts  by like a storm was available as low as 110$ on newegg.
The time arrived for me to invest on a new hot babe finally. A PNY 8800GT was available on SLmega.com for 19k, that is a reasonable price compared to Unity Plaza prices. And few days later I spotted an EVGA 9800GT for 20k on SLmega. I searched all over the internet about this PNY 88GT but the impression among users of this PNY card was not convincing. That wasn't the case with EVGA, So i decided to pay additional 1k for the EVGA card even though its the same 88GT G92 with a 98GT label on it. So the long awaited hot babe arrived to SLmega local store after 12 days of my initial payment.

I collected the card from them ASAP but I was in a dilemma whether my Casing would not be enough to shelter this new babe. Gosh! It didn't fit in my casing I mean i couldn't even insert it in to the casing. I had to lean one end of the card to the casing and then only I could insert the whole card in to the casing, oh forgot to tell you all, I had to remove one of my HDDs before inserting the VGA. After all the blah blah I powered up the PC, oh crap! nothing happens not even lights of the Casing.. Now I stated to curse the sales person who sold me my new PSU ( I thought the PSU was the culprit thinking it couldn't feed the beast with juice). Within next 10 seconds I remembered that there is a On/Off switch back of the PSU and it may have been switched-off accidentally since I played with the Casing for a while. Bingo! I was correct, that was the case, Phew!.

PC booted up normally and I installed the very drivers supplied by EVGA + the EVGA Precision Tool. From the researches I did before buying this card I knew I can't do even mere 100MHz on Mem of this card (though the mem is rated as 1ns). So I ended up at 960MHz on Mem (1000MHz gave artifacts so I straight away went back to 950 then 960 and didn't try any further; my laziness..lol) . The core clock bump wasn't extreme either but satisfying; 700MHz on core not bad eh? ( 600 stock)
Every game I had performed extremely well but Crysis was an exception, I don't have to explain about it right? you all know about Crysis. hehehe. It was a way too short game btw. More details and pictures will follow.. Stay tuned.lol

Now Playing: COD4..
Coming up next : FarCry2..

Asus EAH3870 TOP Review

Santa must have had some renovations done to his workshop, in order to accommodate all of the new video cards that came out over the last two months. It all started around Halloween, which had a little extra bang to it this year, with the release of NVIDIA's 8800 GT.  While that card might of attracted the lion's share of the spotlight, AMD/ATI released its response, its own 'killer-card' around the mid-two hundred dollar price point, about two weeks later: the HD 3870.

Today we are going to look at a factory-overclocked HD 3870 from Asus: the Asus EAH3870 TOP. A few weeks ago, I was impressed with the combination of performance and price found in PowerColor's HD 3850 Xtreme PCS video card. Maybe the HD 3850 bigger brother will be just as impressive.

Asus EAH3870 TOP left, Powercolor HD3850 Xtreme PCS right.

Alright, let's take a look at this bad-boy. 

The Asus EAH3870 is more on the hefty side of cards, than the slight. It was a double-slot cooler and feels a lot heavier than you'd guess it would, judging from looks. Which much thicker than its nemesis, the 8800 GT, the HD 3870 is about the same length, at a little under 9 inches. You can see some resemblance between the HD 3870 and the HD 2900 XT, but not that much -- in a way, the HD 3870 looks like a 'HD 2900 XT Lite.'

As for the cooler, through the red plastic, you can see a solid block of aluminum fins mounted to the centre of the board. This stretch of GPU-cooling heat-fins are all aligned so that air is expediently pushed through, flowing over the card and out the rear. While the Asus EAH3870 heat sink doesn't have nearly as much metal as a HD 2900 XT, or say, 8800 GTS does, the amount it does have does look substantial enough to provide adequate cooling. Unlike some HD 3850 cards that I have seen, this HD 3870 also has copper-colored aluminum heat sinks on the memory, connected by thermal tape.

A standard-sized fan dominates the right side of the PCB, ready for both duties: cooling the heat sink, and getting air flowing off of the memory as well.

The Asus EAH3870 features a Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts decal on the cooler, on which a German Panzer-commander stares off to the right side of the video card (perhaps dreaming of ledenhosen and blitzkrieg'ing), and a Canadian artillery officer stares off to the left (perhaps dreaming of hockey and incendiary grenades.) Besides the decal, there isn't all that much apparent difference between this Asus video card and the reference board design.

The HD 3870 has 320 stream processors (same amount as the HD 2900 XT), as well as 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs. Being an TOP edition, Asus has overclocked this video card. The GPU clock is set to 850 MHz, while the 512MB of GDDR4 memory is clocked to 1143 MHZ. Unlike the HD 2900 XT, the HD 3870 has a 256-bit memory interface. A 256-bit memory bus was sufficient to allow for some great performance from the 8800 GT cards, so, hopefully this will hold true for the HD 3870 as well.     

On the back end of the card we have the standard double DVI outputs, which support resolutions up to 3840x2400.

Read the full story here