Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3870

Functionality and value here are closely tied to each other. With respect to performance, this mid-range offering from ATI/AMD easily redefines the market as the Diamond HD 3870 (SKU 3870PE4512) competes with and often beats its high-end predecessor in many areas. However, the real appeal here is the Diamond HD 3870's price point. With a recent slash in prices, the MSRP of the HD 3870 went from $245 to $189. And with a little searching can easily be had for very close to that. I personally think what AMD/ATI and their add-in board partners did here with respect to the HD 3800 series video card is nothing short of amazing. Returning performance to the mid-range video card market with these new affordable GPUs that finally leave us with a feeling that you're getting something for your money, whereas mid-range GPUs of recent history seemed to just give mediocre performance with an equally mediocre price.

While the benchmarks prove that NVIDIA still holds the upper hand in performance, it's fair to say that ATI has a good competitor in the price vs. performance department, with many HD 3870 models, including Diamond's 512MB version, currently hovering around $150 these days. The 1GB GDDR3 version comes a higher clocked GPU to go along with the double sized memory buffer, but these additions didn't offer all that much more performance. Couple the overclocked1GB model's only slightly higher performance with its significantly higher price of around $230 ($190 with current MIR), and it's difficult to justify spending the extra money, especially now that the Radeon HD 4850 has arrived for about the same price. Each cards' retail bundle also offer little other than a basic list of extras, differing with whichever card you choose. It was good to see the extra cables found in the 1GB Viper's box, but surely there's not enough there to even help mitigate the price difference. With the way things are now, we're feeling snakebit, as it's almost a toss-up between these two Vipers. The 512MB performed well, and is cheaper, but really doesn't offer anything new that we haven't seen before. On the other hand, the 1GB gave us better numbers, yet the price point makes it a hard sell.

The Diamond Radeon 3870 1GB offers plenty of features, double the memory, higher GPU clock speeds, and a cooler that likely rivals the very best aftermarket solutions. Once the pricing comes down this will be a great card to own.

The Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB graphics card would make a good choice for just about any user, but it probably isn't the best one. The performance differences between it and the 512MB version of the same GPU that sells for much less are pretty small unless you are playing a ton of Bioshock or World in Conflict. The NVIDIA 9800 GTX also makes choosing this card difficult since you can spend a bit more money and get some much better gaming performance in a whole host of titles.

Any way you slice it, though, that's expensive—on par with the GeForce 9800 GTX, a product that vastly outperforms the Radeon HD 3870. 300 bucks will also buy you a pair of GeForce 9600 GT cards; one would be faster than the 3870 1GB, and two would roughly double its performance in many cases. All of which adds up to one inescapable conclusion: Diamond's Radeon HD 3870 1GB is a singularly poor value. I'm all for pushing the boundaries with new memory sizes when the time comes, but nothing we've seen from this product justifies its price.