Diamond is a company primarily working in North America, mainly perhaps because that's where it's based and selling cards to OEMs, which is a big market in North America. For this review they sent us two cards, and at a first glance they may look like nothing out of the ordinary, since they're both based on the RV670 core, just like the card from MSI. But, Diamond has managed to squeeze in 1GB memory, which no other HD 3870 has. The memory is still GDDR3, frequency is set to 900MHz, although measured to 870MHz. The core operates at 825MHz, much like the MSI card and a slight increase of AMD's reference clock of 775MHz.
As you can see we have two cards from Diamond, with minimal visual differences, beside the fact that the cooler says DDR4 on the 512MB card and nothing about the memory type on the 1GB card. When removing the cooler we see that there are also some differences in the VRM department, first of all a larger heatsink and a couple of extra voltage regulators and a pair of extra, unencapsulated capacitors with the 1GB card. Below are some close-ups of the two cards.
There's not much more to add here, the 512-bit bus will hopefully make up for the lower frequency, comparing GDDR3 to GDDR4, which should be slightly faster due to its higher clock frequencies. We finish with two pictu res of the memory used. The 512MB card uses 0.9ns GDDR4 from Samsung, while the 1GB card has 1.1ns chips from Qimonda.
