Happy Radeon HD 3800 day!

The new HD 3850 and HD 3870 are finally here! There seems to be plenty of information available but it looks like this not one of those newfangled "hard launches". I have yet to find a website where they currently have one of these new cards in stock. (Woops! I take that back. Newegg has 3 different HD 3850s and 3 different HD 3870s.) These cards are indeed DirectX 10.1 compliant even though our pages say only DirectX 10. (Mike we need to add a 10.1 option.) [H]ard|OCP has some delightful AMD slides that are no longer under embargo. 

I encourage you to consider the price point of these cards when looking at reviews. Comparing these cards to a 8800 GTS ot 8800 GTX is fine, but it is very important to keep in mind that those cards cost much more than both the HD 3870 and HD 3850. Check out these paragraphs from [H]ard|OCP's review :

"The Radeon HD 3850 is priced at $179, this compares directly with a factory overclocked GeForce 8600 GTS. We are going to use an EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS Superclock (720 MHz/2.1 GHz) which on Newegg was $179 at the time of writing this. This is a highly overclocked video card and will represent the 8600 GTS GPU in the best light possible. 

For the Radeon HD 3870 things are slightly more complicated. The MSRP on the Radeon HD 3870 is $219, and we are assured at launch it will be at this price with some retailers. Obviously pricing will vary a bit, but we should not see a situation like with the 8800 GT currently selling way above suggested retail pricing. The GeForce 8800 GT was positioned to be between $199-$249, but so far we have not seen it that low (except for a very few cards that sold out quickly). Stock clock 8800 GT cards are even selling for $299 at some retailers. The lowest price at Newegg at the time of writing this for an 8800 GT was $269, and those were out of stock. In fact every 8800 GT at Newegg was out of stock at the time of writing this and the average price was $293. As it stands right now, going by street price, the Radeon HD 3870 is much less expensive, and not price comparable with an 8800 GT."

You may notice that we have no reviews linked in our card pages. That is all Mike's fault. He upgraded some software or something recently and I just noticed that our review adder is broken. He has some idea in his crazy head about making this site even awesomer which means that periodically, I feel like a Beta tester. So for now, I will link some reviews here:

[H]ard|OCP reference HD 3850 and HD 3870 review
PC Perspective refernce HD 3850 and HD 3870 review
Elite Bastards PowerColor HD 3850 Extreme review
Extreme Tech reference HD 3850 review
Legit Reviews CrossFire HD 3850 review
TweakTown Asus HD 3870 review
Guru3D reference HD 3850 and HD 3870 review
The Tech Report reference HD 3850 and HD 3870 review
Firing Squad reference HD 3850 and HD 3870 review
HotHardware reference CrossFire HD 3850 and CrossFire HD 3870 review
Overclockers Club Sapphire HD 3870 review
Hardware Canucks CrossFire HIS HD 3870 review