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Power Usage

To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we ran a demanding part of 3DMark06.

The 55nm fabrication process of the RV670 GPU helps keep the Gigabyte HD 3870 at a very reasonable level of power usage. A standard 400W-450W power supply would not very strained by having this card in your case -- unless, of course, you have other high-demand components, such as a multiple hard drives, or instance.  

Overclocking

To be honest, my expectations for the overclocking of Gigabyte's HD 3870 were mixed. On the positive side of things, Gigabyte's quality "Ultra Durable 2" construction -- which consists of better-than-average ferrite core chokes, solid organic polymer capacitors, and lower switching resistance MOSFETs -- could do nothing but help overclocking; on the flip side, it isn't often that a enthusiaut-class video card does not have any sort of metal heat sinks on the memory chips.

My tredipation was well placed, as the GPU overclocked quite well, but the memory didn't achieve the level of overclock I was looking for. Nonetheless, a core speed of 889 MHz and a memory clock of 1089 (2178) MHz isn't that bad at all. This is a very reasonable overclock considering the default clock speed of a HD 3870 is 775 MHz, and 1000 (2000) for the memory. For comparison, our last HD 3870 we reviewed -- from VisionTek -- reached 884 MHz (core) / 1292 (2596) MHz. However, to be fair to Gigabyte, the VisionTek required the fan to be running at 100% for this VisionTek overclock to be stable, and was pretty loud at that setting, whereas even at 100% fan power for the Gigabyte HD 3870, the Zalman wasn't that loud at all.

Some enterprising overclockers out there might want to throw an old heatsink that they may have kicking around, right onto the memory and see what kind of new speeds they can reach. The memory chips are Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ1A's, which are rated to 1000 (2000) MHz. With proper cooling, you should not have trouble getting at least 200 MHz above that rated speed, I'd presume.