What happens when you take a Radeon HD 3870 graphics card and slap a gig of memory on it? That is the question of the hour, since our subject is Diamond's new card with just such a configuration. The Radeon HD 3870 has established itself as a pretty decent option among mid-range graphics cards, although it's squeezed by formidable competition from Nvidia. Could doubling up on video memory allow the 3870 to distinguish itself from the likes of the GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 8800 GT? We decided to find out.

Diamond's novel facet
Diamond's new take on the Radeon HD 3870 doesn't depart too radically from the established formula. The card comes with a default GPU clock of 830MHz, well above the 775MHz baseline created by AMD but not quite as high as some of the cards we tested in our mid-range roundup, which ranged as high as 850MHz. Similarly, the card's 1GB of GDDR3 memory comes clocked at 870MHz, for an effective data rate of 1740MT/s, on a 256-bit bus. The 512MB versions of the 3870 generally come with GDDR4 memory and consequently feature clocks as high as 1.2GHz. Diamond's, er, ace is its larger memory size, coupled with the fact that GGDR3 memory tends to have lower latencies and thus perform better than GDDR4, clock for clock. On the flip side, GGDR4 tends to consume less power.Diamond has outfitted this puppy with a little bit larger cooler than the norm; the oversized blower causes its enclosure to protrude slightly above the top of the card itself, much like a GeForce 8800 Ultra. The cooler doesn't look to be tall enough to create any sort of clearance problems in your average PC case, but those with small form factor systems may want to proceed with caution.

Beyond that, the 1GB card comes with the usual complement of output ports and accessories, including a single DVI-to-VGA adapter and a DVI-to-HDMI adapter. Analog video junkies will appreciate the assortment of composite, component, and S-Video output cables (while the rest of us will tolerate them, I suppose). Diamond eschews the temptation to bundle a game with the card, and given the usual value proposition involved there, we're not inclined to complain.