In the distant, by the standards of the computer industry, 2008 discrete accelerator Radeon HD 3850 was released. The characteristics of this accelerator indicated that it belonged to the group of high-performance graphics cards. Moreover, the margin of its speed was so large that for a long time it continued to be relevant and allowed to realize almost all the tasks of that time.
Destination. Delivery list
As previously noted, the Radeon HD 3850 was intended only for high-performance computers. The characteristics of this accelerator were most suitable for launching toys or processing video information. In other cases, it is not practical to use such a high-speed discrete solution. When implementing less demanding tasks, this adapter was not fully used and it made little sense to overpay for it.
The delivery list of the GPU in question included the following key elements:
- discrete accelerator;
- a disk with drivers, utilities and various additional documentation;
- installation and operation manual;
- warranty card.
Chip specifications
Characteristics AMD Radeon HD 3850 focused on the fact that the accelerator was based on the microprocessor model RV670. This semiconductor chip was manufactured according to the tolerance standards of 55 nm. On its semiconductor base, 660 million transistors were applied. Moreover, all of them were made on the currently outdated surface layout.
This microprocessor included 320 shader modules, 16 TMUs and 16 ROP elements. All these elements worked at a fixed frequency of 670 MHz. All these characteristics of the Radeon HD 3850 provided a very, very high level of performance. If necessary, the accelerator could also be dispersed. As the test results showed, real growth could be 10-12 percent in a number of tasks.
RAM. Her parameters
Characteristics ATI Radeon HD 3850 focused on the fact that this accelerator must be equipped with 512 MB of RAM. But some manufacturers released models of such an accelerator already with 256 MB of RAM. Such solutions cost much cheaper, but the lack of RAM had an extremely negative effect on their performance. The type of chip used is GDDR3. The latter worked at a frequency of 828 MHz. The width of the physical bus connecting the microprocessor to the video buffer was 256 bits. As a result, the owner of such an accelerator could count on the throughput of the RAM subsystem at 52 Gb / s. Of course, now this value looks very modest, but in 2008 this number looked phenomenal.
Conclusion Reviews
The characteristics of the Radeon HD 3850 allowed this accelerator to provide a very significant level of performance in 2008 when implementing the most complex software tasks. But since then a lot of time has passed. Therefore, this discrete device managed to become very outdated. Therefore, PCs with such an accelerator need urgent modernization for the reason that such a computer has almost completely turned into an “electronic typewriter” and has completely depreciated.