On the next few pages we'll show you some photos. The images were taken at 2560x1920 pixels and then scaled down. The camera used was a Sony DCS-F707 5.1 MegaPixel.

Alright, we'll start off with a photo of the packaging so you know what to look for in the stores. I'm glad to see that HIS dropped the "Hi-Fi" concept. It made no sense. Included in the packaging is HDMI adapter, in such a case I say it's okay for a manufacturer to stamp the box with HDMI / 1080P Full HD ready as the card is fully capable. Good stuff.

There she is, the Radeon HD 3850with IceQ3 cooler from HiS which is armed with 512 MB gDDR3 memory. It's has quite some horsepower for a card in this price-range. This card easily weights a pound. Next to that it has a two slot cooling solution due to the IceQ3 cooler. Quite honestly, this is the kick-ass product that will fight directly with NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 series of cards, seriously it will eat such green cards alive. This is just a LOT of performance for that money ... have a peek at our benchmarks later on, okay?

The lovely gold colored DVI connectors and blue PCB make the card stand out of the competition.

It's a pretty thing to look at isn't it? But wouldn't it be cool if HiS would change the PCB color to black? The 3800 series of products have two DVI connectors, which both have dual-link support. Single link connections use one TMDS 165Mhz transmitter, while dual links use two.

Dual link DVI pins effectively double the power of transmission and provide an increase of speed and signal quality; i.e. a DVI single link 60-Hz LCD can display a resolution of 1920 x 1080, while a DVI dual link can display a resolution up-to 2560x1600 and even higher.

In the middle see the find a 7-pin HDTV-out mini-din, a user can plug an S-video cable directly into the connector, or use a dongle for YPrPb (component) or composite outputs, or use the 3-way RCA HDTV analog connector.

What you can't see very well is that the card needs to be connected to a 6-pin power connector, which all modern PSU's have.

The reference cooling of the 3850 series is single-slot yet the card runs very hot, this is a thing of the past with the ICEQ3 cooling design that HiS implemented. It works great.