Thermal Performance

The Radeon HD3870 Toxic ran at idle with a temperature of 41°C and ran at 58°C under load. I wasn't sure how the Ultimate was going to perform with the passive cooler, but I had nothing to worry about. The card idles at 45°C and heats up to 61°C, which isn't bad at all. I wasn't expecting much higher temperatures.

The Sapphire Radeon HD3870 Ultimate is just another example of Sapphire's ingenuity, much like the Toxic.

Finals Thoughts & Conclusion

Although clocked at 775 / 1125MHz, just under the Toxic's 800 / 1152MHz, the Ultimate more than pulls its own weight. With the HD3870's GPU and a passive cooler, the HD3870 Ultimate makes for the perfect video card for silent operation. This would benefit home theater systems and silent desktops.

All of our benchmarks were carried out in 64-bit environments, whether Vista Business, or Ubuntu 8.04. The Ultimate only trailed slightly behind the Toxic. I'm attributing this performance gap to ATI's Linux driver as discussed in the Linux section of the review.

Between the rock-solid performance and passive cooling, the Sapphire Radeon HD3870 Ultimate may very well be one of the best videocards on the market right now. Linux support for ATI cards is slowly improving, and only falls slightly behind AMD's former flagship 8800GTX card in Linux performance. We can't argue with the "Ultimate" moniker Sapphire bestowed upon this card.

Pros

• PCI-Express 2.0 Support
• Keeps up with GeForce 8800GTX and HD3870 Toxic
• Blazing performance
• Four heatpipes and massive heatsink passively cool card.
• HDCP / HDMI compliant for watching HD movies on HD displays

Cons

• ATI's Linux driver holding performance back
• Top-mount heatsink may cause some clearance issues.

Rating

10/10