First thing you’ll notice on the card is the GPU Cooler from Zalman. The Zalman cooler on the graphics card is a 2-ball bearing fan with a heat sink that is shaped like a half moon. There are 11 fins on the fan. The standard ATI HD3870 has a cooler that stretches from one end of the card to the other, but the GIGABYTE cooler only covers the graphics chip.

The GIGABYTE RX387512H card is blue colored, reminding me of the old Hercules brand. Under the cooler is a set of 8 memory modules to provide the 512MB that this card carries. The memory is clocked at 1800MHz effective (900MHz actual). Memory bandwidth on the card is 57.6GB/second the reference bandwidth. Core clock speed on the HD3870 is the default 775MHz.

The PCI Express power connector is the standard 6-pin connector found on graphics cards from the first PCI Express cards in 2005. Some cards like the 8800 Ultra require two power connectors with an 8-pin connector and a 6-pin connector, but this one requires a single connection. Every PSU sold today will likely come with a 6-pin connector unless it’s a budget PSU.

The top of the card has the Crossfire connectors. Every HD3870 card has two Crossfire bridges allowing the gamer to run three or even four cards in Quadfire mode with the upcoming Catalyst 8.3 drivers next month. To run in Crossfire mode you need two bridges and two cards. Some sites have experimented with running two different cards in Crossfire mode.

The Input Output area is standard with two Dual-Link DVI ports. There is a newer standard for monitors called HDMI but you can use either two HDMI monitors, two DVI ports or two monitors with D-sub connectors if you use converters. Rounding out the connections is a HDTV port to allow the video card to connect to a HDTV.