The Card

Moving onto the card itself, the front looks a bit weird with a large plate covering most of the front and three little pipes heading out the top and going around the back. To the right of the card you can also see a heatsink covering some of the hotter components on the card.

You can see the heat pipes head out from where the core is and split off into a giant area on the back of the card.

Follow those heat pipes and you ultimately end up looking at what is essentially a giant heatsink that helps dissipate the heat the core generates.

The cooler generally feels of pretty good quality and is one of the better heatsink-only jobs we have seen in a while.

If you do the normal run around the card it's a pretty standard HD 3850 setup, we have a single PCI Express power connector at the back of the card while across the top we have the Crossfire connectors if you feel like running two of the cards.

The I/O department also carries the standard two Dual Link DVI connectors and TV-Out port that we see on most high-end cards these days.

As for the specifications of the card, while Ultimate might be in the name it really only refers to the huge heatsink that we have on the card since it carries the default clocks of 668MHz on the core and 1656MHz DDR on the 512MB of GDDR3 memory.

While the card is of course capable of PCI Express 2.0 it has full backwards compatibility with the PCI Express x16 slots on other motherboards outside the X38 and X48.