I am looking at this video card and am wondering if it is still worth the $220 with the DDR3 ram  Is it truly a 3870 or is it a 3850?
 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814125086
 

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1 [...] index.html
 
Seems good to me.

Yes, it is truly a 3870. It has the full 775MHz core clock, and the only difference is the GDDR3 memory, which shouldn't make a huge difference in performance. There are only two cons to this particular model 1) GDDR4 will consume less power than GDDR3, and 2) the Zalman cooler, while better than stock single slot coolers, will not expel the hot air out the back of the case like a dual slot would. Just some food for thought.

*edit* ^Evilonigiri pretty much summed it up right there.....

I keep waiting for another "big dog" to reply and be the devil's advocate saying, "No, no, no!  Do not buy a 3870 that has only DDR3 Ram."
 
But I, too, have read that DDR4 makes very little difference.  Will it still make very little difference a year from now when I still have this same card and am attempting to play new games, mayhaps even DX10 games if some elements of DX10 ever make it to XP or if I ever upgrade to Vista?
 
And when i look at the cards at newegg, this one still jumps out at me.  The ~$220.00 price is nice, but I like it for other reasons over the ~250.00 cards.  But I would go up to ~$250.00 on another card if there is some debate here on this card.
 

tbth, i bought my 3870 for the higher clocks... and the GDDR4... but if GDDR4 doesn't make that mcuh of a difference to the overall performance, then why not get it???

I wonder how the overclocking is on the Gigabyte 3870 GDDR3. Also, wouldn't it be more accurate to call this card a 3850 512mb Superclocked edition?

Its still the HD3870 core, it will clock fine, clocking the memory hardly gives ANY performance boost.. its 95% core clock that does. Nice price too, also comes with NWN2... awesome game.
 
Make sure your case has a few fans in it with front to back air flow since the card has an interior cooler on it.
 
BUY IT !

Yeah that's the main reason I didn't buy the nice Powercooler 3850 512mb. It had a nice Zalman like fan on it, but I really like the air to flow out of my case because my case sucks. With my old 7900GS in it, my CPU temps were about 5C higher.

I can agree also, I bought the Diamond HD3870 with the 2slot cooler. Yes it will keep temps a bit lower, but if hes is saving a few bucks and its only a few degrees and also if he is not going to o/c much than its worth the price saving.

 
I have read a lot about DDR4 not being much of boost over DDR3 but haven't seen any benchmarks supporting the statement.  Are there any good comparisons out there?  I am curious what the numbers look like.  I do see the 2600XT under the VGA charts...anything anywhere on the 3870s?

the're there... but not the GDDR3 ones, i don't think... maybe a google for a revioew of the card???

I don't think I read about the GDDR4 not giving a big performance boost in a 3870 article, it was in the 2600XT article that Tom's did. It seems logical that a higher-performing card would see a smaller performance boost (at least percentage-wise) than a weaker-performing card.

But then again, we are talking about computers here............