Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby Edition Video Card

Temperatures

Usually, we don’t dedicate an entire page to video card temperatures, but it was included this time around as it seems that it has become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers. Diamond also uses a different cooler than the reference design, so this is a must for a review. Using ATI Catalyst Control Center to monitor the temperatures we found the idle GPU temperature to be 37C.

With the ATI Tool open, the video card was rendering the object in the picture above at over 900 frames per second. This object puts the GPU at 99% load, which is great for heating up the card. We let it run for half an hour and it was enough to get the card up to 56 degrees Celsius. It should be noted that this was done on the open test bench with the motherboard laying flat, so expect slightly higher temperatures with the card installed in a case.

Let’s take a look to see how the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB video card does against other ATI Radeon HD graphics cards.

Benchmark Results: The Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB is significantly cooler than the ATI Radeon 3850 256MB with the stock cooler. At load, the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB was an amazing 39% cooler and at idle it was 30% cooler. That means on average the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB is 35% cooler than the reference designed ATI Raadeon HD 3850 with just 256MB. Diamond did a great job with cooling on this card and while it may not look pretty, it does the job better than expected. Now that we know how the card does when it comes to cooling, let’s move on to overclocking.