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While Neoseeker has reviewed a number of HD 3870 cards over the last few months, the good news has been that they have all been unique in their own way. The Gigabyte HD 3870 continues this trend as well, with the most obvious feature seperating it from the HD 3870 pack is its unique cooling solution. Gigabyte chose to go with Zalman do design their cooler. You are probably familiar with Zalman Tech -- they are a Korean company that has become renown for their effective cooler designs, and has been around since the late 20th century (--well, since 1999 anyways).

This time around Zalman has come up with a half-circle heat fin array, composed of aluminum and copper. While it may look a little less serious than some coolers we have seen recently (such as the one on VisionTek's HD 3870), this Zalman 2-ball bearing cooler proved effective in our testing. The fan ran at a high RPM, as well as being fairly quiet, even when manually set to run at 100%.

Left to right: VisionTek HD 3870, Gigabyte HD 3870, Asus HD 3870 TOP (close to reference board design)

As effective as the Zalman fan is, there are two faults to this cooling situation that are apparent: first off, many people have a preference for hot air being moved out off their case by a cooler; and secondly, the fan only blows a bit air over the Gigabyte HD 3870's memory, and their is no metal heatsink at all over this important region. While it is pretty much assured that this will not be a problem for regular operation, not having a heatsink over the memory is sure to hinder overclocking. 

The Gigabyte HD 3870 also features 'Ultra Durable 2 Technology', which can be seen as marketing catchphrase basically describing 'Higher Quality Components.' But this isn't to deride Gigabyte for choosing this name: the higher quality ferrite core chokes and capacitors are something to be proud, for sure. To what extent they improve performance should be seen in the benchmarks. 

Let's take a look at some numbers, shall we? The Gigabyte HD 3870 is not a factory-overclocked model -- and actually has a slower than average memory clock -- and can be attached to the following numbers, as reported by GPU-Z:

As you might have noticed as well, this is one of the few HD 3870 cards that has GDDR3 memory instead of GDDR4 memory. 

As will all HD 3870 cards, this current generation of from ATI supports DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, PCI-Express 2.0, HDMI audio, and has HDCP decryption ability for playing HD / Blu Ray DVDs. Also with the HD 3870 you get a Tessellation unit, and ATI's Universal Video Decoder.