Home > Consumer Reviews > Sapphire Radeon HD3850 512MB GDDR3 Dual DVI-I / TVO AGP Graphics Card

I bought this card as a way to extend the life of my aging AGP based system. I have a P4 2.8 GHZ machine w/ Windows XP and 2 GB of RAM. I was using the system w/ an NVIDIA 7600 GT Card.
I have been a big fan of NVIDIA in the past because I think they make great cards and have very stable drivers. I had tried ATI cards in the past and have always gone back to NVIDIA mainly due to stability of driver issues. This was the fastest AGP based card that I could find so I decided to give it a try. By the way-I only use my machine for World of Warcraft. My frame rates had dipped into about 12 FPS since I just upgraded to a 26 inch 1080P Samsung monitor.

I uninstalled my NVIDIA driver and uninstalled the card and put this one in and I downloaded the full Catalyst Suite from ATI (the most recent one from December 2008) and restarted the machine. I have to say I've been very impressed with this card. I have the graphics setting now pretty much maxed out and its running at 1900x1200 resolution at 30 to 40 FPS. So basically, it allowed me to squeeze about another 6 months to a year out of my system. I'm planning on getting an allienware system built next year.

Overall-I'm very impressed with the price and quality of the card and the driver stability seems to be much better. Maybe since AMD took over ATI they fixed this issue. Hope this review was helpful.

I originally was saddened very much when I learned how obsolete my old video card was. I upgraded from an ATI Radeon 9800 XT (AGP interface). I thought this card was awesome and was disappointed that it was the only thing holding me back from playing newer games such as Bioshock. My older card only had pixel shader 2.0. This was VERY depressing as I bought the computer used and wasn't looking forward to the option of having to replace the whole system. However I was surprised to see that such a good card came in the AGP format. This card is just awesome. It is however extremely long, longer then I had anticipated. If your computer is a small compact thing, this simply will not fit in it. It has a power cord that comes with it. Its really simple to plug in; Just make sure your power supply can handle the extra strain. Also this card does come with DVI ports (2) and S-video (1). Don't worry though: This card will work with your standard VGA monitor as they included a converter. However to fully appreciate this card, you will get better results with a LCD via DVI connection. This card so far has handled everything I've thrown at it with surprising numbers of FPS (frames per second). I am extremely pleased with this card. I was not looking forward to having to replace my whole computer just to try and get a PCI-E slot. If you know your case has a great amount of space, and your looking to take your game to the next level, you should really try this card out. You will be stunned!

While NVIDIA seems to have abandoned the AGP market in late 2007/early 2008...ATI stepped up to plate and hit a homerun with this awesome graphics card. I previously had a NVIDIA 7950 (over heated), then NVIDIA 7600GS but this beats them both. Very smooth animation, incredible 3D effects, easy install. The ATI software support is not as great as NVIDIA, but it will get you the latest drivers.

If you're stuck with an AGP motherboard and aren't ready to upgrade yet to PCI-E, get another year of gaming with this graphics card.

If you still have an AGP computer, this card works wonders to extend the life of an old system.

That being said, the printed manual was generic and useless - don't even think of reading it, it gives erroneous instructions and at best it will confuse and anger you. The online manual is somewhat better, but still doesn't adequately explain installation.

The trick is that this card, like other high powered cards these days, requires a connection to the computer's power supply. A Y-adapter (two 4-pin to one 8-pin) is included, but was too short to reach the connectors branching from my hard drives, so I had to buy two extensions (8 bucks each). The manual doesn't explain how to connect these, but if you're familiar with a computer's insides, it's not that difficult.

To get the full power of the card you also need at least a GB of RAM ($135 for me), so eventually I got the card going, but it cost twice as much as I originally expected.

I got this card because my Geforce 7600GS was only able to fill up 80% of the screen on my Sony 50" SXRD and could only reach 1360x768 resolution. More specifically, I couldn't use the HDMI connection to this monitor because the Geforce drivers had no way to handle overscan as NVIDIA seems to be ignoring the AGP market these days. (And I'm not running Vista which has support for overscan.) So I had to use the PC connection to this monitor instead which leaves a lot of black around the image even in zoom mode.

PROS

With the Sapphire Radeon HD3850 I am now able to use 100% of the screen and can reach the resolution of 1920x1080 which is the top resolution of this monitor. Also, I ran a little test with my TrackMania Nations program and it ran fine with every advanced graphics feature activated. Video playback on Windows Media Player also seems smoother. (A problem I used to have with lip-sync on my computer from time to time seems to have gone away.)

CONS

When I tried to install the latest ATI drivers from the ATI site I got the error "Setup did not find a driver compatible with your current hardware or operating system". I did a bit of research and found this was a common problem with ATI products. I tried a few things to make the problem go away but it wouldn't go away. (And I'm a system administrator with lots of experience.) But I'm not having any problems using the drivers that came on the CDROM with the graphics card.

[Update! The solution was to use the Sapphire drivers and not the ATI drivers. The Sapphire drivers are at [...] and are currently slightly older than the ATI drivers -- using Catalyst 9.4 instead of Catalyst 9.5]

MINOR CON

I'm actually not getting use of 100% of my screen, more like 99.8% of it. There is a tiny blank space at the top of my screen that I can't get rid of because the video card doesn't seem to allow vertical adjustments and the vertical adjustments on the monitor are too crude for me to get rid of such a small problem. (The smallest adjustment on the monitor moves the screen twice as much as the small space I am complaining about.)