Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Hey Mac users, tired of looking longingly at that PC-lovin’ ATI Radeon HD 3870? AMD has teased you long enough, and at long last, the Mac & PC Edition has arrived. This card is optimized for use within Apple’s Mac Pro systems and includes 512MB of GDDR4 RAM, 320 stream processors, PCI Express 2.0 support and twin dual-link DVI ports for treating that pair of 30-inch Cinema HD displays like they ought to be treated. Check the read link for the full list of specifications, and get set to drop $129 when this one lands later this month.

[Via TUAW, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Now that they’re out, we bet you’re wondering about the performance of that pair of mid-range, ATI Radeon cards announced this morning. According to TG Daily and just about everyone else, the Nvidia GeForce 8800GT is still the best performing midrange graphics card on the market (for a few bucks more, if you can find it). But if you like the performance of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, you’ll be happy with your lower priced, but similar performing Radeon HD 3870 according to HotHardware. They go on to call the HD 3850 “quite strong” when compared against mid-range cards like the Radeon 2600 XT and GeoForce 8600 GTS. In fact, Custom PC says that the 3850 “blows both of these cards away.” Thanks to the new 55nm manufacturing process, both cards kept power consumption, temperature, and noise levels “way down” in comparison. Lots to love from the benchmarking gang. Only thing left to do now is to track them down for that $179 and $219 MSRP.

P.S. If you spot more benchmarks let us know so we can round the critters up.

Update: Round-up now posted after the break.

Continue reading ATI Radeon HD 3800 series benchmarked: “ATI should be truly proud”

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

AMD is apparently getting ready to launch its new Phenom processor on November 19th, according to DailyTech. The chipmaker’s media guide for the launch seems to have been leaked early, and it’s got some interesting info in it regarding the Phenom and the next-gen Radeon. We already knew most of the Phenom deets, but it looks like the supporting RD790 chipset is also ready to go, along with three versions of the RV670 Radeon HD 3800 series. The low-end 3850 is actually a revised version of the existing Radeon HD 2900 with a die shrink from 80nm to 55nm, but the top-end Radeon HD 3870 is a new design with a 100MHz clock bump to 775MHz. All the cards feature support for Quad Crossfire and AMD’s Triple Play Physics system, but don’t feature any of the rumored hardware video decoders that had been rumored. Unless something changes, we should be seeing all this stuff on the 19th — which is probably when we’ll know about pricing as well.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!