The Card

Without the box provided to us we'll simply just get straight into the card. As you can see it's a pretty standard looking kind of Zalman cooler. Really, it's hard to see how this card differs electronically to a standard 3870 due to the reference model having a cooler that stretches from one end of the card to the other.

As you would expect, we see standard equipment like the PCI Express power connector located at the top right of the card while across the top of the card towards the I/O side we have our Crossfire connector.

Quickly having a peek at the I/O side of things it's also very standard with our Dual Dual-Link DVI connectors and the standard TV-Out.

Physically the biggest changes from a standard 3870 are the Zalman cooler along with the blue PCB. Where it becomes interesting though is what GIGABYTE say they use as far as components go.

While the card carries the same default core of 777MHz and the GDDR4 comes clocked in at 2252MHz DDR, where this card differs is by using the same high grade components used in GIGABYTE's motherboard lineup. The MOSFET front sees "Lower RDS(on)" which are designed to help produce less power draw; this in turn helps keep the temperature down.

We also see Ferrite Core Choke Design which stores the energy; this particular design that GIGABYTE uses helps hold the energy for longer which results in lower power loss. We of course also have all solid capacitors which have always been known to give the best reliability when it comes to anything they're used on.

While this might sound all nice, what it's actually going to do for our gaming experience is a bit unknown. Fortunately we will figure this out soon enough so let's get stuck into the benchmarks.