![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , February 25, 2008
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
ASUS EAH3870 TOP
The ASUS "TOP" branding represents ASUS' best line of overclocked out-of-box video cards, and TOP is coming to the ATI Radeon HD 3870! We'll test the new ASUS EAH3870 TOP with today's most demanding games and find out if overclocking makes a real difference in gameplay!
Introduction
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. is one of the largest and most successful computer hardware manufacturers in the world. A Taiwan-based company, it manufactures a wide variety of computer hardware, including motherboards, video cards, optical drives, notebooks, networking equipment, and barebones desktop and server systems, among many others. In 2005, its products received 1,706 awards from various enthusiasts and IT related media outlets. Their 58,000 employees shipped 52 million motherboards in 2005; enough to line up from New York to San Francisco.
The ASUS product we are evaluating today is the ASUS EAH3870 TOP.
ATI Radeon HD 3870 GPU
ATI launched the Radeon HD 3870 GPU on November 15, 2007. The GPU features 320 stream processors, 16 texturing units, and 16 raster operators (ROPs), just like its older sibling, the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Unfortunately, ATI cut the external memory bus on the Radeon HD 3870 GPU down to 256-bits wide, as opposed to the Radeon HD 2900 XT's 512-bit wide bus. The new GPU also shipped with support for the new DirectX 10.1 standard, which is supposed to ship with Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
Also introduced with the Radeon HD 3870 GPU was CrossFireX, and its support for multi-GPU acceleration across multiple displays. We give huge kudos to ATI for bringing this capability to us, since it is something that has annoyed us since the first days of both ATI's CrossFire and NVIDIA's SLI technologies. In fact, CrossFireX supports Multi-GPU acceleration up to 4-ways, with either 4 Radeon HD 3870 video cards and an appropriately equipped motherboard with 4 x16/x8 PCI-Express slots, or with two of the new ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 video cards and a motherboard with 2 PCI-Express x16 slots.
ASUS EAH3870 TOP
The ASUS EAH3870 TOP is an add-in-board partner overclocked video card featuring an ATI Radeon HD 3870 GPU, accompanied by 512 MB of GDDR4 memory. The GPU is overclocked from the ATI specification of 775 MHz to 851 MHz, which is a 76 MHz increase, resulting in a 9.8 percent increase in clock speed. The memory is also overclocked, though to a lesser degree. ATI's recommended memory speed is 2.25 GHz DDR (or 1.125 GHz actual), and the memory on the ASUS EAH3870 TOP is overclocked by 28 MHz to 2.286 GHz DDR (or about 1.143 GHz actual). That is a small increase, and it only amounts to about 2.5 percent. It increases memory bandwidth a small amount to 73 GB per second, from 72 GB per second per ATI's reference specification.
The ASUS EAH3870 TOP came to us in ASUS' standard gargantuan box, measuring 18" wide by 12" tall, and 3" deep. The front of the box and half of the inside cover prominently feature Company of Heroes artwork, used to illustrate the fact that this video card comes bundled with the recently released Company of Heroes expansion pack, Opposing Fronts. The back of the box is characteristically void of any value, simply showing specifications and some marketing material in a number of languages.
It should be noted right off the bat that our video card is of the initial ASUS EAH3870 TOP design, using the stock ATI heatsink and fan combination. If you click onto the website you will see that ASUS has recently updated the cooling solution with a custom design. Unfortunately that new design was not released in time for this evaluation. The overclocked clock speeds are exactly the same between both video cards, only the cooling solution has changed on recent versions. Therefore the gaming experience evaluated here today also applies to the newly designed EAH3870 TOP.
ASUS has affixed a Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts sticker to the top of the shroud, as well as an ASUS branding sticker to the plastic fan hub. The cooling device stretches basically the entire length of the card. There are 8 elliptical holes in the shroud toward the business end of the device which serve as a vent for the enclosed heat-sink. On the rear of the device, there is an open space under the shroud for air to enter the cooling device if the video card happens to be butted up against another video card. This video card sports a single 6-pin auxiliary power connector, and the power plug MUST be connected for the video card to operate.
The back of this video card is home to lots of very small surface mount technology components, a few stickers, and the spring-steel bracket which helps secure heat-sink to the GPU. Connection wise, the ASUS EAH3870 TOP provides a pair of Dual-Link DVI-I connectors and an HDTV output jack.
The bundle with this video card is respectable. It includes the full-version of the Company of Heroes expansion pack entitled Opposing Fronts. It also includes a driver disc and a separate manual disc, as well as a small vinyl CD case with which to hold the included media. As accessories go, the ASUS EAH3870 TOP includes a quick setup guide, a dual-Molex to auxiliary power adaptor, an HDTV output dongle, a single CrossFire bridge, an S-Video adaptor, a single DVI to VGA adaptor, and a single DVI to HDMI adaptor.
The Competition
We will be evaluating the ASUS EAH3870 TOP against two video cards: a reference specification ATI Radeon HD 3870, and a reference specification NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. We're including the ATI Radeon HD 3870 so that we can find out if the ASUS TOP overclock will actually provide the gamer with a better experience. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT is here so that we can find out which GPU is a better value for gamers looking to buy a ~$250 video card.
For games, we chose to use Crysis, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Unreal Tournament III. These three games represent the cream of the crop of current games and will provide us with a good variety of performance situations.