Product Review: Visiontek Radeon 3870 Graphics Card

The Visiontek HD 3870 is the graphics card that is affordable and a high end graphics card that is perfect for extreme gaming or multimedia use.

Ease of Use, Performance: 22/25, Look & Feel: 24/25,
Features 24/25, How much I enjoy 22/25

Total: 92/100

The Visiontek Radeon HD 3870 is a high end graphics card at affordable prices with the top of the line features; 512 MB GDDR 4 memory, PCI Express 2.0 & 1.0 support, Direct X10.1 and Shader Model 4.0 support. The graphics card has two DVI-I connections and one S-Video out for connecting two monitors while gaming or watching the current high definition Blu-Ray discs.

Visiontek has some great graphics cards and the latest high definition 3870 cards are the cream of the crop. Okay, enough sounding like a commercial, the card is good but how good compared to the same priced NVIDIA 8800 GT graphics card. The latest cards for ATI to come out are the HD 3870 X2 with some really great specifications but also the price is way up there at about $500. The Radeon HD 3870 comes in way under that at about $250 with some impressive gaming frame rates and scores in benchmark tests.

The Visiontek HD 3870 comes with the card which takes two slots in your case, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, the rear connector to S-video adapter, a rear connection to Component adapter, one CrossFire Bridge and the drivers on a CD. The card itself has a very good and large heat sink fan assembly that means a better cooling solution for this intense graphics card.

I tested the Visiontek against a Zotac NVIDIA 8800 GT and saw very comparable scores and frame rates in gaming and also watched some movies and internet video with very good results. The Visiontek graphics card performed just as well as the Zotac 8800 GT in all the tests with some frame rates in some resolution better and some worse.

At regular clock speeds the card did very well but I did not try any overclocking on the Visiontek card. With frame rates and benchmark scores that were certainly on a par with the NVIDIA 8800 GT I see no reason to push the power consumption or heat in my system. I have read some good overclocking results on the internet with this card but really don't see much of a reason to pursue going faster when my system will probably not do much better with it.

My system is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ CPU, 4 GB of PC2-800 memory from Crucial, an ECS KA3 MVP motherboard and an Apevia NEO Power 650 watt PSU. I ran benchmark tests using Futuremark's Vantage and 3DMark 06 as well as frame rate tests for Company of Heroes, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare and Microsoft's Flight Sim X.

For both the Zotac 8800 GT card and the Visiontek HD 3870 I received frame rates and benchmark scores that were very close to each other with some being better for one card and others better for the other card. I think these two cards are very close to matching each other with some minor differences that don't amount ot much in the overall scheme of things when you add up the total of both cards.

Here are the results for my testing:

Futuremark Vantage 1024 x 768 Screen Resolution
No Anti Aliasing and Trilinear Anisotropic Filtering

Visiontek HD 3870

PCMark score 3480
Memories 2979
TV Movies 2638
Gaming 3994
Music 3478
Communications 3062
Productivity 2903
Hard Disc Drive 2927

Zotac 8800 GT

PCMark score 3494
Memories 3292
TV Movies 2403
Gaming 3906
Music 3488
Communications 2974
Productivity 3283
Hard Disc Drive 2775

4x Anti Aliasing 8x Anisotropic Filtering

Visiontek HD 3870

PCMark score 3446
Memories 3042
TV Movies 2567
Gaming 3755
Music 3474
Communications 2971
Productivity 3470
Hard Disc Drive 2953

Zotac 8800 GT

PCMark score 3493
Memories 3241
TV Movies 2330
Gaming 3759
Music 3476
Communications 2943
Productivity 2819
Hard Disc Drive 2962

Futuremark's 3DMark06

1280 x 1024 Screen Resolution
No Anti Aliasing Trilinear Anisotropic Filtering

Visiontek HD 3870
3D Mark

9847
SM 2.0
4378
HDR/SM 3.0
4813
CPU

2176

Zotac 8800 GT
3D Mark

10421
SM 2.0

4915
HDR/SM 3.0
5050
CPU

2165

4x Anti Aliasing 8x Anisoptropic Filtering

Visiontek HD 3870
3D Mark

7287
SM 2.0

3115
HDR/SM 3.0
3096
CPU

2161

Zotac 8800 GT
3D Mark

8192
SM 2.0

3928
HDR/SM 3.0
3287
CPU

2157

1600 x 1200 Screen Resolution
No Anti Aliasing Trilinear Anistropic Filtering

Visiontek HD 3870
3D Mark

8769

SM 2.0

3923
HDR/SM 3.0
3961
CPU

2160

Zotac 8800 GT
3D Mark

9500
SM 2.0

4592
HDR/SM 3.0
4174
CPU

2167

4x Anti Aliasing 8x Anisotropic Filtering

Visiontek HD 3870
3D Mark

6285
SM 2.0

2691
HDR/SM 3.0
2488
CPU

2157

Zotac 8800 GT
3D Mark

6972
SM 2.0

3285
HDR/SM 3.0
2602
CPU

2148

In all the benchmark tests the Visiontek graphics card was a bit lower in the scores than the Nvidia 8800 GT, but now for the frame rate tests.

Company of Heroes Performance Test
Maximum Quality

1280 x 1024 Screen Resolution

Visiontek HD 3870
No Anti Aliasing 39.2 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 34.5 average FPS

Zotac 8800 GT
No Anti Aliasing 44.7 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 33.3 average FPS

1440 x 900 Screen Resolution

Visiontek HD 3870
No Anti Aliasing 37.6 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 31.8 average FPS

Zotac 8800 GT
No Anti Aliasing 38.4 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 27.3 average FPS

Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat

Average Frame Rate using FRAPS Maximum Quality

1280 x 800 Screen Resolution

No Anti Aliasing

Visiontek HD 3870
No Anti Aliasing 54 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 48 average FPS

Zotac 8800 GT
No Anti Aliasing 58 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 58 average FPS

1680 x 1050 Screen Resolution

Visiontek HD 3870
No Anti Aliasing 50 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 47 average FPS

Zotac 8800 GT
No Anti Aliasing 47 average FPS
4x Anti Aliasing 46 average FPS

Microsoft Flight Sim X

Ultra High Quality using FRAPS for Average Frame Rates

1280 x 1024 Screen Resolution

Visiontek HD 3870
18.9 average frames per second

Zotac 8800 GT
19.9 average frames per second

1600 x 1200 Screen Resolution

Visiontek HD 3870
13.9 average frames per second

Zotac 8800 GT
19.7 average frames per second

As you can see from the frame rate tests the Visiontek HD 3870 scored very close if not better in a few cases than the Zotac 8800 GT. The tests show that the cards are about equal and the main difference in them would be other features of the card such as the DDR4 memory of the Visiontek over the DDR3 of the Zotac.

Another main feature you might choose the Visiontek card would be multimedia features like the full HDMI support using the enclosed DVI-I to HDMI adapter for full HDMI output to your HDMI television. I tried this out and had very good results with the HDMI out to my HDTV and watched a nice movie with very good video and audio.

The Visiontek HD 3870 is a full featured HDMI capable graphics card that does a great job of not only video games but multimedia like movies with audio. The card does a great job with the audio and video as well as the gaming for a great Media Center PC or a regular computer graphics card.

I highly recommend the Visiontek HD 3870 for a solid performing graphics card that is ready for all the fully featured gaming as well as current high definition television connection. This card would be fantastic for a Media Center PC as well as a regular gaming computer.