Sapphire's Radeon HD 3870 512MB Atomic is a ground breaking product in many respects, but sadly where it falls short at the moment is on the performance side of things. From what we understand, since the launch of the Radeon HD 3870 X2, the RV670 chips are suffering from even higher demand than they were before. This has resulted in the prices of the standard cards increasing slightly, and bringing them more into line with Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT.

This is a problem for AMD/ATI, because the chip just isn't fast enough---even when it's overclocked like Sapphire's excellent example we have here today. Hopefully, we'll see the price come down again very soon because that's ultimately having an effect on the price of the card we're reviewing here today. Sapphire says that the card should be hitting a £165-170 price point, but retailers are currently asking customers to pay up to £200 (inc. VAT), which puts it almost on price parity with the appreciably faster GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB!

The cheapest we've found the card for is £188 (inc. VAT) on Dabs, which is on the expensive side, but it sounds easier to stomach than the £200 other retailers are expecting customers to pay for this graphics card. Sapphire was quick to point out that the card is a limited edition---more of a technology showcase if you will---than a card it expects everyone to rush out and buy.

What we can take away from this though is the fact that there has been some true innovation here---something that we don't see all that often from add-in board partners. The technology that Sapphire has showcased here is nothing short of awesome -- it not only looks good on paper, but also works incredibly well in practice as it managed to knock ten degrees off the load temperatures of a reference Radeon HD 3870! What's more impressive though is the fact that Sapphire's card is running at much higher clock speeds than the reference card.