ASUS Radeon HD 3850 & 3870

EAH3850 Examination:

The ASUS EAH3850 closely resembles AMD's reference design for the Radeon HD 3850 with the visible differences just being an ASUS sticker on the GPU fan and a Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts sticker on top of the heatsink. The cooler used by the EAH3850 only takes up a single slot and thus the heat is exhausted back inside the chassis. This heatsink covers most of the graphics card's PCB. Beneath the heatsink is the RV670 GPU, 256MB of GDDR3 memory, and the sound chip for HDMI usage. For more on the ATI HDMI capabilities when using Linux, see this recent article.

The Radeon HD 3850 series requires more power than what a PCI Express x16 slot is able to provide, therefore there is a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector on the rear of the graphics card. The EAH3850 supports CrossFireX, which allows up to four graphics cards to be used with this multi-GPU technology. The graphics card had arrived with plastic safety covers over the CrossFire connectors as well as the video output ports. The Radeon HD 3850 has two dual-link DVI connectors with one multi-format TV-Out port. If you wish to use HDMI with this graphics card, simply plug-in the HDMI adapter to an available DVI port.

The ATI Radeon HD 3850 has 320 stream processors, 16 texture units, and 16 render back-ends. In addition, it supports PowerPlay technology and UVD (Unified Video Decoder) support.