HIS is among the industry's best-know ATI GPU integrators and has a various and wide range of ATI-based graphics cards. In December 2007, HIS announced the release of their Radeon HD 3870 GPU based graphics card, which is one of ATI latest releases and is built using the 55nm fabrication process. The GPU has been long awaited by ATI fans, as the company could not offer a GPU that can seriously compete with NVIDIA's GeForce8 family.



HIS took little time in having its lineup embrace the new comer, so it brought to light a rather standard version of the HD 3870 GPU. The card is built on a PCI Express Interface and can support PCI Express 2.0, so for all the users out there that already have a motherboard which has an embedded x16 PCI Express slot, this card might be the thing for you. The memory on the card is set to 512M of GDDR4 on a 256-bit interface and has a serious 320 unified stream processor units of pixel pipelines and vertex engines.



The difference between ATI's HD 3870 and NVIDIA's other GPU's is that it is specified to support DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. These features are rather interesting and unique, but if we are to take a look at today's latest games, we'll discover that there are only a few really successful DirectX 10-based PC games. The GPU also comes with native support for HD gaming and HD video rendering with a full 1080p resolution.



And although the graphics power behind the Radeon HD 3870 is higher than anything ATI had to offer until now, your can get to connect two of this cards by using the Crossfire Multi-GPU technology, thus doubling your graphics horse power.



The card is priced around the $270-$300 area.