Club 3D HD 3850 Overclocked Edition - A luxurious enthustiast card for low budgets

[Mungri]

Hi, I thought I'd write up a review on this amazing pair of cards I got today. They are overclocked 3850's with 720/1800 clocks, and were purchased for just £72 each (£154 inc delivery).


I'll start of with the box itself. Club 3D have simply done an amazing job packaging these cards. The overall presentation is extremely luxurios, elegant, and sleek, yet very minimalistic. They pretty much put every other piece of hardware I have bought and my Apple IPOD to great shame :


The two boxes:







And the box-inside-a-box boxes XD





The presentation of these cards from the minute you open the box right untill installation is absolutely amazing. Unfortunately my lame pictures dont do this packaging enough justice. It simply felt amazing just looking at, and slowly opening these boxes, far better then any christmas pressant has ever been


Then we have the cards themselves, wonderful heatsink fan, and unlike the similar model of this this card made by Powercolor, the Club 3D's are also equipped with heatspreaders on the ram modules:













And the boxed contents:





Installation for me personally was a little tricky as the cards were much longer then my previous ones I have had, but I managed to fit them in by moving one of my hard drives up. But if you have a decent modern case that is better then mine, you should have no problems:







Sorry for the blurry pics, im not too good with cameras XD

You should be able to make out the orange light on the top card. Each card is illuminated by an orange led which reflects off the shiny copper heatsinks very nicely. It makes me wish I could replace my blue case lights with orang ones now lol.


And heres the overclocking result, I have only overclocked them using CCC so far as rivatuner was a little dodgy with crossfire, I think I just have to reinstall it or get a newer version to clock them higher:





They were fully stable without a single artifact at 770/1900 clock and ram speeds. The hottest one GPU got was to 58 degrees, while the other never went over 50 degrees.


Now for people that have already read about the powercolor variants of this card, you may have been put off by people saying how noisy it was. But let me make this completely clear - Both of these Club 3D cards are in fact 100% SILENT!!! I cannot hear them over my silent case fans or any other noise, in fact I found my PC quieter with my old Triplex 3870 gone and with these two 3850's installed.


These are quite simply the best graphics cards I have ever bought for the money, at just £72 each for this kind of an enthuiast card with top grade packaging, there can be no faulting them, and right now they have to be the best price / performance cards available on the market, providing that you can grab them at around £70 each :p


Thouroghly impressed with these beauties, they are highly reccommeded and I suggest that if you need a cheap upgrade from an older card, you go for one or even two of these now while they are available for such a low price.


Unbelievable, unbeatable value and quality. Thanks for reading

[jas420221]

Nice little write up!!!! Dont get too excited about these cards when the 9600gt is comprable in price and most definately in performance.

[Mungri]

Nice little write up!!!! Dont get too excited about these cards when the 9600gt is comprable in price and most definately in performance.

No they arent, they cost over £100 :p

So do normal 3850's. These ones were available for £72 at E buyer and some place called Stuff-UK which is where I bought them from.

I was fed up of waiting for 4800's and was looking around. A second 3870 would have cost me £110-£130, normal 3850's were £100-110.

Then I found these and bought a pair.

[jas420221]

They are in the states...

[Mungri]

They are in the states...

Yea I wish I could buy from the states and get those mail in rebates too :p

The UK sucks for PC parts, everything is horribly expensive compared to the US.

These 3850's were the cheapest good things available right now, so I snapped them up as I'm now a budget builder. Not only were they the cheapest, they are also the best 3850's available imo.

8800 GT's would be my card of choice if I had an SLI mobo because the price difference between the 9600 GT and 8800 GT over here is tiny making the 9600 GT an unattractive buy. But the MSI motherboard I have was the only motherboard I wanted after reading about it, and I find that putting an Nvidia card on a Crossfire motherboard or vice versa is a waste of future expansion possibilities, so I wanted to stick to ATI.

Also, below £100 and at around the £70-80 category, there are only 8600's which are rubbish. Comparing all of this is what made me buy two of these 3850's, for the price, they are unbeatable in the UK.

I was going to upgrade to a P45, but my crossfire performance, at least in 3D mark seems very good for my motherboard - over 17k in 3D mark 06, so I dont think I am going to bother with a new motherboard at all now because it is too much hassle. I'm going to get a nice not so budgetty 26" monitor though, I want a big screen for my crossfire now

The only game I am going to playing now is Age of Conan, I still need to check my new performance in the game and will do so in a bit.

Performance has gone up in AoC, though not by much. I can basically increase my AA to 8x and get the same performance I used to at 4x AA (25-35 FPS). Before with the single 3870 and 8x AA I used to get 19-26 FPS, so I can at least play smoothly on maximum everything with full AA now

[naokaji]

Club3D = PowerColor? looks identical to the Powercolor one except for the sticker.

the 3850 is nice if you can get it so cheap, nvidia really has nothing to compete against it in the uk (see below why the 9600 is no competition for the 3850 in the uk).

3850 ~ 130$, 3870XT ~180$, 9600GT ~200$, 8800GT 512 ~200$, 8800GTS 512 ~260$, 9800GTX ~350$, 3870x2 ~400$, 9800GX2 ~600$... just so noone blames sales taxes,those prices are pre sales tax.

[Mungri]

Club3D = PowerColor? looks identical to the Powercolor one except for the sticker.

No, it's a different company that just arent too well known. They have been around for a while but just havnt done as well as the other big names yet.

This cards cooler is identical to the powercolour except for the sticker, and is made by a company called Zerotherm. Also as I pointed out, while powercolour use ramsinks on their overclocked 3870, they dont put them on the 3850 which I found annoying. Club 3D have ramsinks on their 3850 as well as the 3870. Otherwise the cards are identical.

At this cards price that I got them for, the Nvidia equivalent was the 8600. But all the other brands of 3850's are priced the same as 9600 GT's, and 8800 GT's and 3870's are simlarly priced too.

These are the links where you can get them from in the UK:

http://www.stuff-uk.net/?s=ST-CGAX-3852DDO
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143186

Another advantage of these cards is that they really arent going to drop in value too much from £70 when it comes to selling them after your next upgrade. It should be possible to get £70 back from selling them second hand within the next 6 months at least.

In comparison, powercolors version costs £88 and doesnt have ramsinks:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...=56&subcat=416
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=722240

The Club 3D makes the better buy, £16 cheaper plus the ramsinks on top as well Oh, and the box is nicer and doesnt have some crappy computer game character as a mascot, its just plain black and white with bits of printed stuff on it. I like my stuff to look proffesional rather then tacky XD

[jas420221]

Another advantage of these cards is that they really arent going to drop in value too much from £70 when it comes to selling them after your next upgrade. It should be possible to get £70 back from selling them second hand within the next 6 months at least.

No chance you could get the same price for a video card 12 months down the road. The stellar price will mix in with everything else, and it will sink like a stone.

[Mungri]

No chance you could get the same price for a video card 12 months down the road. The stellar price will mix in with everything else. thats it.

£70 isnt the usuall price of a 3850 right now, £100 is, these are just cheaper now then they ought to be, hence why I doubt they will depriciate much beyond £70. Look at this card as actually having a retail worth of £100 right now, just that it it is being sold for £30 less then the current asking price for such a card.

The only thing that would make them depriciate more then £70 is if either ATI or Nvidia release a low-mid range card for the £70-80 price point that outperforms this one, and going from how pooey mid range cards at this price point usually are, I doubt this would happen.

When I bought my 3870 in february, I still managed to sell my 2 year old X1900 xtx for £95. There are people out there on ebay that dont mind paying for second hand cards, or they dont have a clue about what they are buying XD. 3870's are selling for £80-90 second hand right now. The thing is that high end cards lose a lot of value when the next ranges are released, but the mid range cards depreciate a lot less in comparison.

The market for upgrading and selling second hand is huge, I have been managing to get upgrades at next to nothing for a while now from buying new and selling old

[jas420221]

The only thing that would make them depriciate more then £70 is if either ATI or Nvidia release a low-mid range card for the £70-80 price point that outperforms this one, and going from how pooey mid range cards at this price point usually are, I doubt this would happen.

You can doubt it...but it will still happen, like has been happening with darn near every generation of cards before it.

Im sorry to keep 'hating' on this thread...maybe I should just politely back out and let you enjoy yourself a bit. I just dont like misinformation is all. Bottom line is you found an incredible deal!!!

Best of Luck

/unsubscribed.

[Mungri]

Found a good benchmark here to show the performance you are getting for £140 here:



Today's graphics cards: the value angle - The Tech Report - Page 1

Finally, perhaps our most unexpected observation is that multi-GPU setups have the potential to deliver solid value. Mid-range cards like the GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon HD 3850 offer strong value propositions, and that effect is multiplied by pairing two of them together.

3850's in crossfire are very good at this price

[Retro]

Found a good benchmark here to show the performance you are getting for £140 here:



Today's graphics cards: the value angle - The Tech Report - Page 1



3850's in crossfire are very good at this price

Bang for the buck
Really close or even better performance than some of the pricier uber-cards.
Plus, they look damn good

[Mungri]

8800 GTS costs £140-150
9800GTX costs £220
3870 X2 costs £230+

Two overclocked 3850's cost £140

Compare them on that chart and you should get the picture.

[naokaji]

it looks like there was a price drop for the 3850 and 3870 in the uk though... I've seen several 3850's in the £8x range, but the standard versions, but 72£for a non standard one is damn good. Other brands non standard 3850's cost the same as regular 3870's usually.

[Mungri]

Ahhhh, crappage! The first card crashes as soon as I start ATI tool's artifact scan @ 810 Mhz, and after a few mins at 803 Mhz. 796 Mhz is stable though, I will try and get a 60 minute error free run first though.

The ram is also stable and artifact free at 1053 Mhz (2106) but artifacts at 1096 Mhz. I havnt tried anything inbetween yet, but 800/2100 is great for these cards!

Now I still need to figure out how to overclock the second one

Crashed after 19 minutes at 796/1053, now testing at 776/999.

776/1053 is completely fine

[Bladesinger7x]

I agree great card for the buck.

I just recenty got the same card, RMAd the 7900GT that was going to hell, and paid only 20€ for 3850 (a new card costs around 90€).

The funny part is I expected to get the basic version of 3850, but they sent me the OC version.

Initialy I had my sight on 9600GT but would have to pay
around 100€ to get it...so I got my 1st ATI card

The copper cooler is great, but I already changed it for
a water block so it silent and cool (load temp around 40C).

[Mungri]

The copper cooler is great, but I already changed it for
a water block......

OMG what blasphemy!!!!

I <3 the copper. Kind of makes me want to grab an MSI X48c for its huge copper lollercoaster in between the CPU and GPU, plus 2x 16x PCI-E slots

That would look nice.

Theres lots more places stocking these now, see here:

http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/pl/37-1...Compare-Prices

This place is the cheapest, with delivery it comes up to &#163;10 less then what I paid Not fair!

http://www.kikatek.com/product_info....ducts_id=64280

[Mungri]

I went ahead and ordered a top whollop motherboard and ram to go with them, I just couldnt resist. They will be put onto a lovely MSI X48c when it arrives tomorrow (cheapest X48 available and more copper bling bling from the lollercoaster), and also I went ahead with some OCZ Flex II since the board only has 2x DDR2 slots to last me untill 2x2 Gb of DDR3 becomes affordable. I'll have lots more pics and a motherboard review coming up soon

[xMrBunglex]

you'll get much better CrossFire performance with an X48 motherboard over your old P35. smart move on your part. i know because my first CF build was with a P965 motherboard and everything outside of 3DMark was disappointing.

[Mungri]

Yea my 3d mark 06 score is still identical, but from benchmarks I have seen, crossfire on a P35 with a 4x slot is abysmal and lose too much performance.

However there was absolutely no difference between 2x 8x and 2x 16x, but compared to the MSI X48c at &#163;150, P45 release prices are looking far too overpriced for what was meant to be a budget chipset so I went ahead with the MSI X48.

I'm having to reinstall Age of Conan atm because the client keeps crashing, and it takes ages. So I cant check for any improvements yet. I'm not going to be playing anything else untill Sacred 2 and Spore, except maybe a race on Trackmania or a bit of Guild Wars, so I want AoC playing as beautifully as possible.

I had an annoying problem with my X48 today though, you can see the thread here:

http://forums.hexus.net/scan-care-he...d-working.html

I installed it, plugged everything in, double checked, tripple checked that everything was right, push the power button and nothing ... I couldnt tell what was wrong for ages. I removed the Slent Knight II to check I had the CPU in right, tried a single stick of ram and a single graphics card, tried different power cables and still nothing.

I was using the external adaptors for the switch and led connectors for the first time and kind of forgot all about them. I removed the adaptors after Scan support told me to check my switches and plugged the cables directly into the motherboard as I always used to do.

Hey presto, teh power button worked!

(I wanted to hit my head against a wall for the rest of day).

Some good news though, overclockers were doing saturday delivery for the same price as normal delivery today, so I get my Flex II modules tomorrow. They wont really make any difference over my current modules, but they only cost &#163;110 inc delivery and I can sell my current ones for &#163;70-80 so I went ahead with the best DDR2 ram on the market since I've wanted a 2x2 Gb set @ 1200 Mhz for ages. My current ram wont even boot at 1125 Mhz on the X48, it used to boot but BSOD on the P35 at this speed, 1110 Mhz is still its stable maximum with really loose sub timings.

Cant wait to get overclocking XD

Oh, and all that copper and those huge Flex II modules are going to look P.I.M.P.

[Mungri]

Hi, I apologise beforehand if I am not supposed to do this, but both of these cards are now available for sale with the bios modification to 775 / 2000.

I wont post the links here, but if anyone is interested feel free to PM me for info.

I have a pair of these on order and will write about them once I get them

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=GX-096-PC