Asus EAH3870 TOP

The Card:

Like the box, Asus has given the EAH3870 TOP graphics card the Opposing Fronts treatment, with the sticker covering the plastic heatsink shroud adorning the game’s two main characters. Despite this though, the card looks just like any other Radeon HD 3870 graphics card.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing though, because we’ve been really impressed with the Radeon HD 3870’s reference cooler. Asus has said that later down the line it does plan to replace the cooling solution on this card, but we haven’t heard when this is going to happen and, more importantly, how the new cooler will perform in comparison to the stock cooler.

Asus has impressively overclocked the core to 851MHz, which is 76MHz higher than the reference clock and should roughly equate to a ten percent performance increase in GPU-limited scenarios. Meanwhile, the memory has been increased by a much more conservative 30MHz (effective) – we find this a little strange, as the memory used on the card is rated up to 2.4GHz.


On the back of the card, there is a pair of dual-link DVI connectors along with a VIVO port. Each of the dual-link DVI ports has its own dedicated pair of crypto-ROMs (as is required for a dual-link connection), meaning that you can play two protected high-definition streams back concurrently on two different high-resolution displays.

Of course, RV670 also features the audio controller that allows you to pass audio through the DVI connectors once the DVI-to-HDMI converter is connected, making it an ideal companion for a home theatre PC that might be used for a touch of gaming in the living room. There’s no HDMI 1.3 support because Windows can’t take advantage of some of its features. These include Deep Colour and uncompressed audio streams such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, but the lack of these features probably won’t be a concern for most PC users and the hardcore audio/visual enthusiasts will have a set top box installation that supports this standard.


At the other end of the card, there is just a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector for supplementary power. Even though the Radeon HD 3870 only consumes around 105W of power at maximum load (when clocked at ATI’s reference clocks) and the card supports PCI-Express 2.0, only 75W of power is drawn through the PCI-Express slot. This is required so that AMD can maintain backwards compatibility with older motherboards that don’t support PCIe 2.0.

Warranty:

Asus offers a three year parts and labour warranty with all of its graphics cards – this is actually more than what most other AMD/ATI graphics card partners offer. For example, HIS, PowerColor and Sapphire all offer two year warranties on equivalent graphics cards. Whether or not this is important to you will depend on your quest to void the warranty as quickly as possible in one way or another in typical bit-tech fashion.

In the first year, you should talk directly with the retailer where you purchased your graphics card, but if you’re having problems getting hold of the retailer, you can talk directly with the Asus technical support and RMA team to resolve your problems. In the second and third years of the warranty period, you should go direct to Asus for technical support and warranty queries.