Legit Reviews

Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB GPUs Don't Have 512-bit Memory Interfaces

This past Tuesday we did an article on the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3870 1GB video card and it turns out some of the details in that article were incorrect. When the Diamond Multimedia launched the first 1GB ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card they had the memory interface incorrectly labeled as 512-bit. Legit Reviews contacted the Diamond Multimedia marketing department and they confirmed it was really just 256-bit.




Article Title: Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB GPUs Don't Have 512-bit Memory Interfaces
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/702/1/

Wouldn't having a 256bit bus have made the card a lot cheaper to produce?

Do you think they will correct pricing at all?

Dan

Nordic Hardware found the Diamond Radeon HD 3870 1GB to be 0.26FPS faster than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. They also found that the 512MB card and the 1GB card ran identical in Lost Planet and many other applications. Our testing found the 3870 1GB to be 0.45 FPS faster at 2560x1600 in Call of Duty 4 and .... So far multiple sites have benchmarked the card and shown no significant difference with having double the memory at no matter how high the resolution. The real question is what purpose does this card serve? Is there a place for it in the market? GDDR3 cheaper than GDDR4 and they memory interface is still 256-bit... Makes you think a bit.

I thought it was kind of weird how they magically made the GPU 512 bit like that, that makes more sense

512 bit memory bus means more PCB layers which gets very expensive to design and produce, which is one of the reason why the 2900XT was so expensive compared to the performance it gave

The only purpose this card serves is a dent in the wallet and a ego boost to those who don't know any better. Ooo I have a big bad 1gb video card . I'll take the performance of my itty bitty 512mb 8800gt

The purpose of purchasing a card like this is exactly for the memory. The 512bit memory interface it was supposed to have would have been beneficial in games like cod4 and crysis at higher resolutions and with the "goodies" turned on. A 256bit memory interface isn't worth anybody's time or money.......... nothing to do with ego. And after getting the card and testing it with the above games, there sure is a difference between the 2. ( 256 vs 512 )

sammy wrote:The purpose of purchasing a card like this is exactly for the memory. The 512bit memory interface it was supposed to have would have been beneficial in games like cod4 and crysis at higher resolutions and with the "goodies" turned on. A 256bit memory interface isn't worth anybody's time or money.......... nothing to do with ego. And after getting the card and testing it with the above games, there sure is a difference between the 2. ( 256 vs 512 )

Of course there's a difference between 256 and 512MB, nobody questioned that. Apparently 256 is worth both ATI's and nVidia's time though ;)

Zertz wrote:[

Of course there's a difference between 256 and 512MB, nobody questioned that. Apparently 256 is worth both ATI's and nVidia's time though ;)

The only reason we're being inundated with all this "256" junk is because ati has faltered and has nothing on the market to compete with big green. I call it junk because it's useless to me. ok for the old games with the old crt monitors running 1024x768, but can't give what I want in the high res range on LCD's. I don't like playing games unless I can "see" what the game has to offer. And if you can't turn on the goodies, you are truly missing a lot.

Sammy, lets hope for ATI's sake that this is accurate performance:

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about15370.html

Dan