Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850

SAPPHIRE 100226L Radeon HD 3850 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card

I love how technology advances!  I’ve been holding out from an upgrade of my Saphire Radeon x1600 256MB Video Card for a while now because there’s always something better!  And boy, oh boy am I glad I did!  I kept thinking about getting an ATI x2600 series card, but never could really justify it.  When the ATI HD 3000 series of cards came out it didn’t take me more than a slight price drop to justify the purchase.  For the same as what I paid for one of my ATI Radeon x1600’s (Used to have two in crossfire, gave one to Credal a while ago though, so been running a single for some time now) I was able to get a ATI Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 with double the video RAM of my current card up from 256MB to 512MB.  Also GDDR3 instead of GDDR2 so everything about it is a HUGE improvement, for the same price!  Now when I was looking at the ATI 2600 cards they were the same price as my current card, and even a decent 165% faster in most games than my current x1600.  But since I was planning on going to Vista, it was a good idea to be on a DirectX 10 card, which is another reason for the 2600 upgrade… luckily ATI came out with the new 3000 series of cards, and the 3850 just so happens to be at the mid price range for video cards.  I was EXTREMELY happy abou this as the HD 3850 with 512MB of RAM is about 200% faster than the 2600’s and obviously MUCH more powerful than the old x1600 I had been running.  Power consumption isn’t that huge of a concern either, as it’s got the new 55 nanometer (NM) die.  It’s nice to finally be able to play all of my games at full resolution (1680×1050) with some sort of anti-aliasing, and antistropic filtering.  Plus I’m ready for Vista as soon as it gets here!