AMD Finally Drops 3800 Series ATI Radeon HD Cards

The new 3850 and 3870 Radeon HD cards are offering up the same features as the 2600 series, but at a cheaper price. These cards have DX10 support, albeit according to OpenGL 2.0 features.

They also offer up support for CrossFire X which allows up to 4 of these cards to be slapped together in some sort of dual CrossFire configuration. The 55nm core allows these cards to offer up nearly double the performance per watt compared to the 2600 series, which means they can work cooler, and even without active cooling.

Both cards also support full hardware decoding of HD video and can make use of the extra bandwidth PCIe 2.0 offers. Stats wise the 3850 offers up a 670MHz core, 256MB of video memory operating at a speed of 1.66GHz, and the 3870 offers up double the memory operating at 2.25GHz with a 775MHz core. The 3850 should retail for $179 and the 3870 will be hitting the $219 price point. For now it just works with Windows, but driver support for other OS's is expected.

AMD launches ATI Radeon HD 3800 series [via electronista]