bit-tech News: Asus EAH3870 TOP

[Chierin]

This is the closest that an AMD/ATI-based graphics card has got to competing with Nvidia at the same price point for some time now, but there are still cases where even this factory overclocked Radeon HD 3870 from Asus disappoints me a bit. It pains me to say that because the Radeon HD 3870 is a truly fantastic product that we are big fans of at bit-tech.

The penalty for enabling anti-aliasing is the single most disappointing downside and in particular I'm referring to 4xAA performance compared to what else is on the market at the same price. We're now in 2008 and one would hope that a performance mainstream graphics card is able to cope with 4xAA enabled at respectable settings and resolutions in most games. Of course, / /Crysis is an exception to this rule (and probably will be for some time to come), but there are still times where the performance drop is much larger than what we're used to seeing on ATI-based graphics cards of days gone by.

On the whole though, the card looks to be a great choice as long as Asus meets its suggested retail price and that you also know about the sometimes extreme AA performance penalty. However, our suggestion would be to look at one of the cheaper Radeon HD 3870s on the market, pocket the difference and then dabble in a bit of overclocking. We say this because although the Asus EAH3870 TOP gets close to a similarly priced GeForce 8800 GT, it never really matches it in every scenario.

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