Not so long ago, adding a passively-cooled graphics card to your system meant sacrificing performance for quietness, with manufacturers only willing to use low powered components that were easy to cool without fans.
Not so Sapphire. From the days of the liquid-cooled, overclocked X1900 XTX Toxic, the company has always offered silent or quiet mid-range to high-end cards, allowing the end user to build quiet PCs with at least some gaming potential. So it should come as no real surprise to find that the silent treatment has now been applied to one of AMD's latest HD3850 cores, to add to Sapphire's Ultimate range of passively-cooled cards.
The HD3850 Ultimate follows the family tradition in looks by having the front of the card dominated by the cooling plate over the GPU, but with the 3850 this sits on a second cooling plate that covers most of the PCB, which helps keep the memory chips cool. There is a separate finned plate keeping the voltage unit cool.
Three heatpipes come from the GPU cooling plate and pass over the top of the card and into the huge (235 x 98 x 49mm) finned heatsink on the rear of the card. While a standard HD3850 is a single-slot graphics card, this rear heatsink on the Ultimate changes it into a dual-slot solution, but that's a small price to pay for a passively-cooled card that you can actually play games with.
Under all the cooling plates the HD3850 Ultimate uses reference design clock speeds for the core, memory and shader clocks. The core is clocked at 670MHz as are the 320 pixel shader units, while the 512MB of Qimonda GDDR3 memory (rated at 1.0ns) is clocked at 825MHz (1,650MHz effective) which gives the HD3850 an impressive memory bandwidth of 53GB/s.
The card is also PCI Express 2.0 compliant, which is what the very latest motherboards are going to come with, but is also fully backwards compatible, so you have a degree of future-proofing as well as being able to use the card in any current PCI-E 1.0 x16 slot.
Performance-wise the Ultimate is pretty impressive. At a 1,024 by 768 pixel resolution it produced a 3DMark05 score of 17,650, while it gave a score of 10,735 in 3DMark06 at the same resolution. Which is all well and good but what about in the real world?
Well, an average frame rate in F.E.A.R of 153fps at a 1,280 by 1,024 resolution isn't bad. It does struggle a bit in World in Conflict at higher resolutions (30fps at 1,280 x 1,024) and like most cards, Crysis makes mincemeat of it - 21fps at a 1,280 by 1,024 resolution - but all in all it performs very well for the price point at which it's aimed.
Bundled in the box is a useful selection of hardware: component-out dongle, S-Video to RCA cable, DVI/VGA adaptor, 4-pin Molex to 6-pin PCI-E power cable, single Crossfire connector and, last but not least, a DVI/HDMI adaptor, which not only transports the video signal but also takes the audio signal at the same time. The software bundle comprises Cyberlink's DVD and PowerDVD v7 suites along with a copy of Futuremark's 3DMark06 benchmarking tool.
