Peak Radeon 3870 review
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 10 May 2008

Today we are reviewing a graphics card from PEAK, which is certainly not well know as some other companies out there, but their products have an excellent price/performance ratio. Radeon 3870 is not a new product on the market, but custom versions are always interesting because of the extra features they offer.

Radeon 3870

After the failure of the Radeon 2900XT, ATI had to come up with a very competitive card, but it had to be cheap to make. A few tweaks to the R600 GPU and a switch to the smaller production process made the RV670 GPU cooler, cheaper and a little bit faster. For a while, it was a great offering that beat NVIDIA products by a large margin in the price performance ratio. NVIDIA fought back and now both have products that offer their buyers a similar value for money.

The core of the 3870 is the RV670 GPU. It has 320 shaders, but don’t confuse this number with NVIDIA’s 128, 112 or something similar. If you look closely at ATI’s technical specifications, in most cases these 320 shaders are only 64 when compared to NVIDIA. That is why this card is positioned between 9600GT and 8800GT, which have 64 and 112 shaders respectively. The core clock is quite high, which is enabled by the 55 nm production process. The same chip in Radeon 3850 operates at 668 MHz, and the one in 3870 at 775 MHz, which is quite a lot when compared to NVIDIA’s maximum of 650 MHz for the G92. The catch is that NVIDIA has shaders inside the chip operating at roughly 2.5 times the clock of the rest of the chip, which raises performance. Unlike the R600, the RV6700 has its memory bandwidth reduced from 512 to 256 bit. It was done to reduce production costs, and since pricewise it is now a mainstream product. The internal 1024 bit bus is also lowered to 512 bits. The card uses GDDR4 memory, which in part compensates for the lowered memory bandwidth. 512 MB of memory operates at 1100 MHz, or 2200 effective because of the Double Data Rate.

PEAK’s card is built on a quite short PCB, and has a great cooling solution. It uses similar fins to the well known Zalman products and even on the maximum overclock of 858 MHz it doesn’t get too hot or too loud.