Thermal Performance

The temperature of Sapphire's Radeon HD3870 Toxic did not stray from any extremes during the benchmarking process, in Windows or Linux. While the system was idling, the case had an ambient temperature of 38°C, whereas the HD3870 Toxic held steady at 41°C. Under a full load, such as while running 3dMark Vantage, I saw the case temperature jump up to 45°C and the Toxic to 58°C. The card was "cool" enough that I was able to touch the back of the card and the heatsink without feeling like I was going to get burned. Granted, it still felt hot.

Sapphire did an excellent job in designing the Vapor-X cooling solution for the HD3870 series. Unlike with the GeForce 8800GTX's dual-slot cooling solution, I'm able to use the PCI slot directly below the HD3870 Toxic and not worry about the cooling.

Finals Thoughts & Conclusion

Through testing in both Linux and Windows, we found little difference in performance between Sapphire's Radeon HD3870 and the BFG GeForce 8800GTX OC. The Toxic's largest advantage over the 8800GTX is the support for PCI-Express 2.0, which may very well be what gave the HD3870 the edge in some test.

All of our benchmarks were carried out in 64-bit environments, whether Vista Business, or Ubuntu 8.04. The 8800GTX and HD3870 Toxic seemed to be neck and neck in terms of Windows performance, but the 8800GTX took the lead in Linux peformance. I'm attributing this performance gap to ATI's Linux driver. Although several improvements have been made over the last year, there is still something left to be desired.

At $189.99 at NewEgg, the HD3870 is nearly half the price of the $379.99 8800GTX. For as small as the performance gap is between the two cards in Linux, Sapphire's Radeon HD3870 Toxic is by far the best bang for the buck and won't let users down. For this, the Sapphire Radeon HD3870 Toxic Edition earns our editor's choice award.

Pros

• PCI-Express 2.0 Support
• Keeps up with GeForce 8800GTX
• Blazing performance
• Vapor-X technology heatsinks keeps the card cool in a single slot form factor
• Best bang for the buck
• HDCP / HDMI compliant for watching HD movies on HD displays

Cons

• ATI's Linux driver holding performance back

Rating

9.5/10