Accessories:
The balance of the items provided with the ASUS EAH3850 TOP are shown below. In the below left image we see a vinyl booklet for storing CDs or DVDs, the "SpeedSetUP" multilingual manual, and three discs; one with VGA drivers, one with "Company of Heroes - Opposing Fronts", and one with an electronic copy of the manual in twenty languages.
 
The above right image shows all of the hardware related accessories, which include: a 6-pin PCIe power adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, s-video to composite adapter, a CrossFire bridge, and an s-video to component video adapter. As mentioned earlier in the review, you should be able to connect to at least one of any type of display you might have. And, with the advanced capabilities of HDMI, you can use this connection to send audio and video.
Test Setup:
A system with the following components was used to test the ASUS EAH3850 TOP Overclocked Radeon HD3850 Graphics Card:
» Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Dual Core processor
» OCZ Technology Vendetta CPU cooler
» ASUS P5KC P35 ATX motherboard
» Crucial Ballistix 2GB PC3-12800 DDR3 dual channel memory
» Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB hard drive
The system's operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium with all updates current as of December 18, 2007. In lieu of the driver's provided with the card, the ATI Catalyst software suite version 7.11 was downloaded from the ATI/AMD website.
For comparison purposes, the ASUS EAH3850 TOP was tested head-to-head with some legacy cards from the Radeon family, all with model numbers in multiples of roughly 1300. This comparison will not only show what one of the latest cards in the series can do, but how your gaming experience could be improved by upgrading from a card that is one or two generations older. The cards to be matched against the 256MB ASUS EAH3850 TOP are the 256MB HIS IceQ Radeon HD2600 Pro Turbo and the 256MB HIS IceQ Radeon X1300XT Turbo.
The table below summarizes the key features and specifications of the three cards...
| Model |
ASUS EAH3850 TOP |
HIS IceQ HD2600 Pro Turbo |
HIS IceQ X1300XT Turbo |
| Core |
RV670 |
RV630 |
RV530 |
| Core Clock Speed |
730MHz |
650MHz |
587MHz |
| Memory |
256MB GDDR3 |
256MB GDDR2 |
256MB GDDR3 |
| Memory Speed |
1.90GHz |
1.05GHz |
1.38GHz |
| Memory Interface |
256-bit |
128-bit |
128-bit |
| DirectX |
10.1 |
10 |
9.0c |
Some of the specifications aren't that different between the cards, but as the architecture advances, even slight changes can result in significant performance increases.
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