3850 vs 3870

[hercules71185]

OBVIOUSLY the 3870 is faster. My 3850 blew on me today. I got a refund to debate going up. I'm also in a bind between the 8800gt but, I have that on another post

ok. 3850 vs 3870...
is the price worth the difference.
Can you buy an aftermarket fan or something on the 3850 and have it perform the same for less?

[w00fd06]

The 3870 isn't necessarily faster, i have a 2600XT with an 800mhz core clock (default), and GDDR4 memory, but it's only 128-bit. The high end cards almost always have better memory interfaces.

what are the clocks on your 3850? what 3870 are you looking at, if any yet.

[hercules71185]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814129101
that is the EXACT card I had. It was very good but, as I said since they no longer had it in stock I could either get a similar card a refund or backorder. They do have the best support lol. But, I chose refund to get a better card so I won't kick myself for skimping.
what do you mean by the 3870 isn't faster? I thought it was like 10% faster
EDIT: no particular card yet. I'm shopping around to make sure I'm going to be with something that lasts a bit. So either one of these or the 8800gt..

[w00fd06]

What I meant was certain cards have faster cores, and sometimes faster memory, but i guess, from what i saw on newegg, all of the 3870s are faster, maybe there will be some faster 3850s in the future, most likely Overclock Editions or something. I was thinking of the HD 2k series experiences.

I couldn't find the core clock on you're card anywhere, do you have GPU-Z or anything like that? Otherwise, your card looks fairly good.

If you still want to upgrade, this looks like a good card to upgrade to, if you don't mind the cooling.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814131077

[TheVoid]

The price to performance ratio is just about the same. Adding an aftermarket cooler to either one will give you significant overclocks from what I've heard, from people who mostly have been using the Accelero S1 by Artic Cooling. It's more of a question of what you want to spend as the performance scales in a fairly linear manner. I'm a bit on the cheap side while I have the need for several video heavy applications so I'm going to go the route of a 512MB 3850 with the after market cooler unless I find another awesome deal on the 3870 such as microcenter recently put out that I was too slow to jump on. This way I'll save some money, get a little more performance, and keep the heat down on the card hopefully keeping it in good condition.

[provoko]

Once you buy an aftermarket cooler, you lose the price vs performance ratio since you're spending needless money on a 3850+cooler to OC it to or faster than a 3870 when you could just buy the 3870.

I've read many reviews where they OC the 3850 with stock and it's been fine. Maybe you pushed yours too far.

My recommendation is: Buy another 3850, and this time don't push it too far, if your case temperatures are too high, maybe you should concentrate on a better case fan.

Good luck.