Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 Ruby edition - 1 - A Ruby Introduction

Viper Radeon HD 3850 Ruby edition 512MB

So guys .. one of the first ever VGA card for a PC (my hyper-fast processor ran at 66 MHz back then) I bought was way back anno 1996/1997 .. it actually came from Diamond Multimedia and was called the Diamond Stealth series of products. That little card was based on an S3 Virge and made sure that Microsoft's monster truck racing me was (or whatever the game was called) going at a steady flow of 8 instead of 4 FPS; it might have been even worse .. I don't remember. Point is, the one brand name that though went trough some rough patches always survived throughout the the havoc that is what I call the graphics arena, Diamond multimedia.

We are now a good ten years away from that S3 Virge based product, Diamond is literally back in the game again and places a hard focus on their ATI Radeon line of products. Today we'll peek at a Radeon HD 3850 which they labeled their ' Ruby edition' graphics card. Ruby by the way is that rendered girl you see in the ATI technology demo's. She's living fast and dangerous .. who know it's a reflection of this card as well.

There definitely are some improvements to be found d at this product. As you will notice for example is has higher then reference clock and memory speeds and comes with a custom cooler. Good stuff for sure as we all know that the Radeon HD 3850 just offers really good performance for the money you pay for it. Today's product comes with DirectX 10.1 support, the new UVD (video de/encoding) engine is now integrated allowing full 1080P content playback accelerated and enhanced over the graphics processor, full PCI-Express 2.0 compatible, and has a die-size based on 55nm to die for.

Today we peek at the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 512Mb Ruby edition, a lovely product. It's a Radeon HD 3850 colored with a red PCB, a custom cooler slapped on top of it and they pre-overclocked it to get closer the Radeon HD 3870 performance level, all that for roughly 140 EUR / 179 USD. Not bad. Next page please, where we'll have a look at the technology empowering this graphics card and then startup the in-depth review.