AMD's Radeon 3850 X2 Goes Online Next Week

Chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices is making a comeback with another dual-chip graphics card from the 3850 X2 series. The new offering will be able to deliver less power than the company's flagship Radeon HD 3870 X2, but it will also come with a lower price tag.

One of the first manufacturers to release the new 3850 X2 model to the market will be Asustek with its ASUS EAH3850 X2 1GB model. Although AMD plans to introduce its new offerings sometime during the first week of May, Asustek is already shipping sampling and evaluation units to its selected partners.

According to Asustek, the dual-chip version of the Radeon HD 3850 graphics card will come with two graphics cores clocked at 670MHz each, while the GDDR3 memory is running at 830MHz. In contrast, the 3870 X2 model came with the GDDR3 memory clocked at 900MHz.

Each GPU is allocated 512MB of GDDR3 memory, while the basic design is inherited from the Radeon HD 3870 X2 big daddy. The only thing that differs is the slightly lower clock speed and memory size. The graphics card itself looks as if it were a carbon copy of the Radeon HD 3870 X2.

The card comes with two DVI ports and a single TV-out connector that lets users easily hook a high-definition display directly to the computer. The yellow DVI port is HDMI-ready, but you'll need an extra DVI-to-HDMI adapter to take advantage of it.

Rumor has it that the new card will not be too much of an overclocker. It is highly likely that the card has been already tested at higher CPU frequencies, and was set to 670 MHz per CPU just because that was all it could carry without problems.

Asustek's EAH3850 X2 1GB card will arrive next week and is expected to hit the retailers' shelves at an estimative price tag of around $350.

MORE RELATED ARTICLES: Alienware's Aurora Gaming Rig Gets Phenom 9850 Facelift Asustek to Unveil Its Blu-Ray, Dual-HDD Multimedia Notebook Asustek Reportedly Working on ATI Radeon HD 3850 X2 ASRock Unveils World's First DisplayPort Motherboard Asus Unveils Blu-Ray M50 Multimedia Notebooks AMD's Radeon Graphics Get VESA DisplayPort Certification The GeForce 9800 GX2: Almost Here, Same Old Architecture CeBIT 2008: Foxconn's Water-Cooled Systems are Some Mean Graphics Machines AMD Is Not Impressed by Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT AMD to Introduce the ATI Mobility Kit