In our last review, we looked at a pair of cards from Sapphire based on ATI's new GPU, the RV670.  In the review, we compared both cards and found that the performance of the HD3850 was significantly lagging behind the HD3870 despite both cards using the same GPU albeit at different clockspeeds. However, we now have in our labs, the HD3850 Xtreme Professional Cooling System Edition courtesy of PowerColor. Not only does it feature a Zerotherm heatpipe cooler and 512MB of memory, PowerColor has taken the liberty to overclock the card at the factory before delivering it into the hands of enthusiasts! 
Given a boost in memory and clockspeeds, we will to find out if PowerColor has managed to unleash the power of the HD3850 to bring it to the next level and give NVIDIA a run for it's money.

The PowerColor Radeon HD3850 Xtreme PCS Edition comes in an unassuming box.
Would it be a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?  Read on to find out.

Let's take a look at the basic specifications differences before we open it up:

Feature/ Model
HD3850/ 256MB
HD3850 Xtreme PCS / 512MB

NVIDIA 8600GTS/ 256MB
Stream Processors
320
320

32 @ 1450MHz
Texture Units
16
16

16
Render Back-ends
16
16

8
Transistors
666 Million
666 Million

289 million
Fabrication Process
55nm
55nm

80nm
Core Clock
670MHz
720MHz

675MHz
Memory Clock
1.66GHz
1.8GHz

2.0GHz
Memory Type
GDDR3
GDDR3

GDDR3
Memory Interface
256-bit
256-bit

128-bit
System Bus Support
PCIe 2.0 x16
PCIe 2.0 x16

PCIe x16
DirectX Support
10.1
10.1

10