The first thing I noticed about the Sapphire HD3850 video card was the fact that the card and cooler will only take up one slot in your system when it is installed. There have been rumors that the HD3850 cards are rather warm running units, yet during our testing with two cards we never had issues running of these cards in a well ventilated Thermaltake case. The memory chips are arranged in such a manner that they are all covered by the cooler and thus they receive the benefit of the air being blown across the card.
Here you see the headers that are used to attach the jumpers when you are using more than one video card in your system. We did find something interesting when we were using these headers and the connector jumpers. We initially started out using two of the jumpers and everything seemed to work fine except for the fact that it appeared our CrossfireX scores seemed a bit low. After reading in the in ATI's Crossfire forum that one person found his scores went up considerably when he removed one of the jumpers I decided it would be worth a try to see if our scores improved. To our surprise when we removed the front jumper and used only the rear one our scores increased by 15%. I was always under the impression that you could use one or two since it made no discernable difference.
Looking at the end of the Sapphire HD3850 you can see the large size capacitors that are placed near the power connector as they serve to smooth out and ripples that may be introduced into you video card via your power supply. You can also the only heatsink used on the video card other than the one that is mounted to the base of cooling fan.
Connection should not be a problem with HD3850 since we have a pair of DVI connectors and a single S-Video connector from which to chose. We will be using our 24" Dell widescreen monitor when we test this card and the second card in CrossfireX setup.
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