Midrange Graphics Card Round Up

Asus 3850 OC Gear

For our final product in this roundup we have the Asus EAH3850 OC Gear. The packaging makes it very clear that this is no standard 3850 and we have an extremely thorough bundle inside this box which also includes a very unique item…

The component pictured above fits in a 5.25” drive bay and via USB it connects to the systems motherboard. By twisting the dial on the front we can control graphics card core and memory speed as well as monitor framerates, temperatures and even change the system volume. The only down side is that some cases with doors might not allow installation of the device.

The Asus 3850 OC Gear uses a similar cooler to their 9600 model which we covered earlier in this article. An additional heatsink is added to the rear of the card and there are some nice touches such as rubber covers on the various connectors and a colour coded DVI port to indicate which output is preferred for the HDMI adapter. The shipping speeds on the card are 670MHz core and 830MHz memory which exactly match the reference specifications. The card can of course be overclocked very easily using the bundled hardware and the use of Hynix 0.8ns memory means we have plenty of overclocking potential available.