The Card

Getting past the normal cables and CDs, you finally find yourself staring down the barrel of a HD 3870 which doesn't have a whole lot going on at the front of the card. We can see that the card uses heat-pipe technology to cool the core, and we have a plate that goes over the memory modules that are also located on the front.

The right of the card has another heatsink that is designed to keep some of the warmer electronics cool. We can see that four heat-pipes protrude out the top of the card and go over to the back.

Here is where they split up and go into a giant heatsink. There is a warning sticker on the back of the card that tells you not to touch it while running due to the heat. We can tell you it gets extremely warm back there; the fact that there was a warning sticker just meant we wanted to touch it so much more. We could tell you not to touch it as well, but you probably will.

Moving back to the front of the card, we don't have anything out of the ordinary when it comes to connectors. The back of the card holds a single PCI Express connector while across the top of the card we have a Crossfire connector. Fortunately, the cooler design doesn't do anything stupid like block the ability to make use of Crossfire, which is always a nice thing.

Moving to the I/O side of things, we have two Dual Link DVI connectors and a single TV-out port. While the card is technically dual slot, the design actually means you can use the slot directly below the graphics card thanks to the cooler going over the back of the card.

Specifications

It doesn't come as any real surprise that the passively cooled HD 3870 comes with the stock 775MHz core and 1125MHz DDR memory clock on the 512MB of GDDR4 memory.