ATI HD3830 Surfaces

It seems like the mainstream wars have just got hotter with another contender which is none other than the ATI HD3830, which will compete currently against the GeForce 8600GTS. NVidia will be no doubt countering it soon with new mainstream offerings of its GeForce 9-series which might be positioned to replace the GeForce 8600GT/GTS as its mainstream successor. It looks like the previous price hikes have been justified to make way for another sibling to ATI’s HD3800 Series. Heres the report from tech report:

As the rumor mill talks of price cuts AMD may apply to its Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 graphics cards soon, Hong Kong-based site HKEPC has posted a report that says the red team is also cooking up a mainstream Radeon HD 3830 for mid-April. This new card will be priced at $119-129, HKEPC says, which would place it well under rumored post-cut prices of $145 or less for the Radeon HD 3850 and $159 or less for the 3870.

Hardware-wise, HKEPC says the Radeon HD 3830 will be based on the same RV670 graphics processor as the 3850 and 3870, and that it will have the same number of stream processors, texture units, and render back-ends. The site doesn't mention any clock speeds, but it does say the width of the 3830's memory interface will be reduced from 256 bits to 128 bits. That reduction should cut memory bandwidth by half, or possibly more if AMD pairs the 3830 with slower memory than the 3850 or 3870.

At $119-129, this purported Radeon HD 3830 would compete more or less head-on with Nvidia's GeForce 8600 GTS. The 8600 GTS also has a 128-bit interface, but its G84 graphics processor has fewer shader processors, texture units, and render back-ends than AMD's RV670. Nvidia may very well have some lower-end GeForce 9 cards up its sleeve, though.

We now have ATI HD3650/70 running neck and neck onto the GeForce 8600GT, and the HD3690 variant is known to beat the GeForce 8800GS in some benchmarks, so it will be very interesting to see how the HD3830 pits against the GeForce 8800GS and the new mainstream GeForce 9-series in time to come. Another very good question would be how good will it performs in comparison its lesser cousins the HD36xx series given its 128-bit memory bus.

Source: Techreport