The middle ground of graphics cards has for some time been a barren place to go shopping. It's been left to holdovers from generations past, such as the X1950, to provide the bargains, while new mid-range launches fail to either interest or ignite.And then, in the midst of its leanest period in some time, ATI struck gold. Its HD 3850 has proven to be - whilst not a cutting edge performer - the best bet where bang to buck is concerned, for some time. DirectX 10-ready, and selling on the cusp of £100, the card is a welcome relief for upgraders keen to give their performance a boost, but who don't have much budget to do so.
The particular variant we have on test here is sold under the Triplex brand name, and comes with 512MB of on-board GDDR3 memory. A 256MB version is also available, but given that it costs only £10 or so less, it's worth finding the extra few pounds for the extra memory. Above this there's the 3870, and if the budget really will stretch that teeny bit further then there's the GDDR4-laden 3870, which will give you appropriate extra punch.
But that's not to say that this 3850 isn't worth your bother. Because as a mid-range card, at a low-budget price, it comfortably punches above its weight. Not straying from the ATI reference design (in this case with memory speeds of 2 x 900MHz), there are no frills to be found. The box is simple, the contents minimal and there's not a sniff of a free game to be found.
Yet this is a capable and quiet graphics card. Once we plugged it in (2 x DVI and a TV-out are provided), we set about - not in work time, obviously - playing a whole host of games. From the X1900 that immeditely preceeded it in our test rig, we were able to knock the settings for Call of Duty 4 far higher up the scale; the 3850 struggles to handle every piece of eye candy at speed, but the frame rate was strong in the upper echelons of the display settings.
Crysis struggled a little more, but even so it was very playable without overly-compromising the settings. Again, it was a fair improvement over the X1900 before it. A score of 9,395 in 3D Mark 06, backed up by an X6800 processor with 3GB of RAM, confirmed our feeling that this is a pacey, if not spectacular, graphics card.
There are, of course, cards from both Nvidia and ATI that outperform the 3850. But it's hard to find an alternative that offers quite the level of bang for buck that you get here. Plus the fact that Crossfire is supported opens up a future use for the card once you get your next upgrade, too. A worthy purchase.
