My earliest memory of video cards was of a Diamond Monster 3DFX Voodoo 1 card being installed in my first modern computer and playing the latest greatest video game Quake in Glide mode for the first time (GL Quake). The early Diamond and 3DFX went through a lot of history together including the Monster3D II, the Fusion (their Banshee). S3 bought Diamond in 1999 and then went bankrupt. 3DFX went bankrupt in December of 2000. So why am I beating an old horse on two long-dead companies?

A couple of years ago Diamond re-entered the graphics card market with graphics cards based on ATI (now AMD) hardware after their brand and assets were bought by a company called Best Data. You can read the Diamond is Back article written by Doc from the middle of last year. Doc wrote an article on the Diamond 3850 256MB card a couple of months ago but today I’m reviewing their 3850 512MB card in single mode and in Crossfire.