I just started reading, and first thing I thought was NICE JOB on finding new brands I never heard of.
Palit?
Zotac?

Figures those are the brands that got my attention.lol

The Zotac looks great, and $231 shipped at Newegg aint bad, but I would not buy it because of the warranty. 2 years aint enough.

I wonder about the Palit though...........nothing major at stock speed, but with 1GB of ram, heavy duty cooling, and 3 phase power, I wish we could have seen some overclocking.

I know you cant try and OC all the cards timewise, but the Palit seems like it is begging for it.

I must echo what some others have said. While this was a very thorough and comprehensive review, the lack of variety in brands puts a massive damper on the effort. Four of the brands reviewed have two cards in the running and one has three.

Reading the article, and before I turned to the conclusions page, I had pegged the Zotac as the Editor's choice. Seemed to be right in the right place in all the charts.

You picked over your runner-up a much noisier, much hotter running, and slower performing in every case card at the same or lower street price as your editor's choice based solely on the warranty? Ouch.

The HIS IceQ cards (I've had 2) start out quiet but can develop a clicking later on after some months of use.

I purchased my 8800Gt/256 alpha dog about 6 weeks ago, between the initial flurry of low prices and the current downward trend of the 8800GT/512's.

Back then, I got mine for about $225 shipping, MIR and everything, while the price of the 512's seemed to be edging ever upward to the $300 mark.

It's nice to know that they're coming down, but I still feel vindicated about my purchase, regardless if the 8800GT/256 is "slowest" in the test. But I guess no one ever bought a card expecting them to hold their value like a Bentley.

Quick question: when is the next ATI round of products due to come out, approximately? In particular, I'm looking for a process shrink or something to reduce power draw under load. As long as it's at least 3850-level performance, but a little lower power draw (faster is good, though). This is for a small 690G system, and the PS is 380W. The user I have is just using integrated video (and now realizes they need more for gaming), but they have 2 HDs and 2 optical with a 89W X2, so I'm concerned about maxing out the PSU. I'd hate to underclock something, and they don't want to replace the PSU and have barely enough to buy a mid-range video card (~$200). Ideas? Or would a 3850/70 (non-OC I expect) work ok? The numbers I see here seem like it would be awfully close, and other sites numbers' are all over the map, some lower than TRs, others higher. Thx!

This roundup reminded me again of just how lackluster ATI's offerings really are, especially given their price points. The 3870 needs to be a $199 card, the 3850 a $149 card.

I went with the HIS 3850 512 in December mostly for price, noise,and power consumption. The price spread with the 8800GT was much wider at that time.

For reference, reviews at tech powerup show the 3850-512 cards splitting the difference in performance between the 3850-256 and 3870 cards for about $20, with gains at higher resolution.

The power consumption changed significantly from TR's previous review. Before there was a signifacant difference between Geforce and Radeon, in this review the diffence is trivial. You would expect the Radeons to have a good edge being 55nm.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13603/9

The Radeon series gains 20 watts and the Geforce looses 15.

/cries ... not fair.. where is EVGA Superclocked 8800GT ... /cries

eVGA 8800GTS g92 is available for $265 shipped after $30 MIR at Newegg. Post-holiday season and perceived economic slowdown must mean there is a lot of excess stock building up. There are also 8800GT available for $200-220 which is a great price too. It is certainly a good time for those who don't want to spend excessive money on the halo products to be buying a graphics card.

Perfect timing for my future card purchase, thanks guys! Now I am just wondering where the next gen nVidia chip will lie, somewhere between the GS and GT or a 8600 and 8800 GS? I may still wait to get the lower-power device. The computer room may need an additional 50 watts in the winter, but surely not when it is 90 out.

I hate to be a shill and I am certainly not a fanboy, but I am very brand loyal once I have a good experience with a company. While I am sure that all of the 8800GT cards are reliable, the only company I will buy from right now is eVGA. Their lifetime warranty is fantastic, as is their tradeup program.

The reason for my loyalty is that I have had two issues with cards that they not only fixed, but did one better. On both, they advanced exchange them, on one even though I didn't technically register it in time to qualify for the advanced exchange. The tech support people spoke English as their native tongue and their service was top notch, if for no other reason than the people actually knew what the hell they were talking about and weren't just reading solutions from a database. They recognized that I had some knowledge and didn't waste my time with a bunch of dumb questions.

Great article!
I miss these kinds of round ups!

If only you would have included a 8800 GTS 512 g92 for reference

Would have loved to see 8800gs cards tested instead of 5 different kind of 8800gt and more variety of games in common resolutions. 1280x1024 1600x1200 1920x1200

Good read. (typo on pg8 when you mention colours for the graphs)
I've had good experineces with both XFX and HIS in the past. Too bad the Diamond card I have now isn't in the list. The HIS cooler specifically was great with a 1900XT at keeping temps in check when overclocking.

It seems you picked the most overpriced 3850s available. I think a stock speed 256MB card for $170 (or less AR) would be a much better value than any of these offerings that are trying to compete in price with the 3870 & 8800.

I truly commend you for spending what must have felt like an eternity testing card upon card upon card. But it was definately a damn good review and I'll be referencing this chart for quite some time I reckon.

Just one question. What happened to the "bigger" plans with testing and Crysis? Is it still in development or was the whole idea botched (although I don't even know what the idea was).

Cool arty. It would've been nice to have a price/performance plot graph, similar to the "Weighing the Value of Today's Processor's" article... but maybe the plots would be too close together.

Holy cow. That's some serious benchmarking volume.

Nice picture! Must read.