Palit's 8800GT Super+
Piling on the memory

Palit's 8800GT Super+ is an interesting beast on a couple of fronts, one of which is its gigabyte of onboard memory. Piling on extra memory has always been an easy way for board vendors to make their cards stand out. However, because mid-range cards are usually a little short on the pixel-pushing power needed to drive smooth framerates at the extremely high resolutions, it rarely improves performance. The only case where we can see the additional memory being truly useful, beyond bragging rights, is in SLI configurations. SLI configs are essentially bound by the memory size of a single card, and pairing two of these up effectively the GPU doubles horsepower available.

Many aspects of the Super+ hint that Palit is going after overclockers. There's the chunky dual-slot cooler, which ties into heat spreaders mounted on the memory chips. You also get a passive heatsink for the voltage regulation circuitry and some venting on the PCI back plate. The venting doesn't pipe airflow directly from the cooler, though, so at best it will only provide exhaust through natural convection.

Palit further deviates from the norm by equipping its card with three-phase power—one more phase than is called for by the 8800 GT reference design. This should help the card deliver cleaner power to the graphics chip, particularly when it's heavily loaded.

Flipping the card reveals another cooling element: a flat heat spreader that covers a number of memory chips. This back-plate sticks out a little, but not so much that I'd be worried about it creating clearance problems.

With extra power phases and some of the most elaborate cooling we've seen on an 8800 GT, one might expect the Super+ to benefit from some aggressive factory overclocking. And one would be wrong. The card comes clocked at stock speeds for the 8800 GT, and while you're free to push things on your own, Palit's three-year warranty doesn't cover overclocking. None of the graphics card warranties we've seen do.

PowerColor's AX3850 and AX3870
Big on copper

Factory overclocked and sporting some of the lowest prices in this round-up, PowerColor's AX3850 and AX3870 look pretty good on paper—until you get to the piece of paper detailing their single-year warranty. We didn't cut HIS any slack on this front, and none will be forthcoming for PowerColor, either. One year just doesn't cut it. PC graphics may move at a torrid pace, but a Radeon 3800-series card is still going to be more than viable a year from now.

The first of PowerColor's Radeons is the AX3850, which sits in the middle of the pack in terms of clock speeds. Cooling is provided by a custom copper unit that wraps an array of radiator fins along a circular heatpipe that surrounds the cooling fan. This is a dual-slot design, but you get 512MB of memory here, which is something you don't necessarily get with every 3850. The memory chips are tied into the card's cooler via copper heat spreaders.

Looking largely identical is PowerColor's AX3870. Like its little brother, this card is moderately pushed beyond stock speeds, and it features the same dual-slot copper cooler and passive heatsink on the voltage regulation circuitry. You have to look pretty carefully to see differences between this card and the AX3850, but a few telltale cues are visible, including a slightly different capacitor layout.