Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 Ruby edition

The Verdict

There's no doubt in my mind that the Radon HD 3850 Ruby edition brings in a lot of value. Diamond definitely did a nice job bringing this card to the market as you can play most modern games up-to a resolution of 1600x1200 with spiffy image quality settings just really well. On the other hand it isn't hard to see that the GeForce 9600 GT slowly has adapted the Radeon 3850 price strategy and is now competing with the 3850 with roughly the same baseline price. And while performance of the 3850 is good we can't ignore the fact that the 9600 GT seems to be better. On overall that product is good for another 10-15% in your average framerate. In and this business that's a lot.

Then an issue, this Diamond Radeon Viper 'Ruby edition' graphics card is slightly more expensive opposed to the baseline cards, so you can see why I'm struggling with with the recommendation here, but only a little. Fortunately for me, that final choice you guys have to make, we happily present you the results on a Diamond platter though. Back to Diamond, they offer a really nice product. Admittedly it's clocked slightly faster than the reference model of these cards. The difference however is really small, in fact hard to measure. The implementation of the dual-slot cooler leaves me a bit mystified. Though it performs all right, I do not believe that the incremental noise it makes weigh up-to the performance of the reference cooler. Then again, we really like product differentiation and seeing a company do stuff like this I can obviously only recommend.

Rounding it up. The product brings you good mid-range performance though at a too high price. You will absolutely love the product though. Additional value obviously is the integrated UVD core logic. Should you want to decode Blu-ray or HD-DVD media over the GPU, this graphics card will do it nicely at 1080P for you. And it will even apply enhanced pot-processing features to optimize image quality a little, all really good stuff.

The Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 'Ruby edition' graphics card can be purchased in the 170-180 USD price range, which absolutely is a fair price. But to be able to compete with the GeForce 9600 GT .. I do feel the price needs to come down to 150 USD.

Other then that, very much recommended if this suits your budget.

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