Test System & Installation

For this review and future reviews, several companies were kind enough to send us products to assemble a full machine. Sapphire sent us the Radeon HD3870 Toxic, as well as the PI-AM2RS780G 780G chipset motherboard, and an additional Radeon HD3450.

AMD was kind enough to sponsor us with two CPUs, the Athlon64 X2 5000+ and Phenom 9500. OCZ sent a 2GB kit of DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC CrossFire Certified Edition RAM. Thermaltake sent the M9 chassis to house the components, and Excelstor provided a 250GB hard drive.

Cooljag also sent two CPU coolers for this review, but due to the close proximity of the southbridge heatsink to the CPU clips we were unable to utilize these coolers in this review.

To power the system, I opted to use the StarTech.com WattSmart 750W Power Supply I previously reviewed. Finally, we will be using Ubuntu 8.04 as well as Windows Vista 64-bit Business edition to benchmark the Radeon HD3870 Toxic. Let's look at our final setup:

We are very greatful to all our sponsors, and we ask readers to stay tuned for individual reviews of these components in the upcoming weeks.

Installation was simple, as I only needed to insert the card in to the PCI-Express x16 slot and connect the 6-pin power cable to the card. Running with the 6-pin cable runs the risk of damaging the card, as well as reduced performance. Sapphire included a dual-molex to 6-pin adapter for older power supplies.

I opted to get the latest drive from AMD's website, rather than use the driver off the CD. Chances are, the videocard was packaged before Catalyst 8.4 was released.