Just like the old adage of waiting ages for a bus and then three coming along at once, you wait six months for a true mid-range graphics card and then a whole host of them suddenly appear. And while there might be only three or four basic models, the host of options available from so many vendors makes the job of choosing the right one a bit intimating.

Well, just to add to the already bulging product listings, here is the EAH3870 TOP/HTDI/512M from Asus which, as you might have guessed from the snappy name, is based on AMD/ATI's HD3870 or RV670.

The RV670 is a 55nm die containing an almost unbelievable 666 million transistors with 16 Texture Units and 320 Shader processes. It has a PCI-E 2.0 interface but is fully backwards compatible with the 1.0 specification, so it will work in most motherboards. Added to the feature set are AMD/ATI's UVD (Universal Video Decoder) which natively supports VC.1 and H.264 decoding, and ATI's Powerplay technology.

In stock form the shader and core clocks run at 775MHz while the 512MB of GDDR4 memory is clocked at 1.125GHz (2.250GHz effective) through a 256-bit interface, for a memory bandwidth of 72GBps.

As with all Asus's TOP cards, the EAH3870 is factory-overclocked, so straight out of the box you have one of the fastest HD3870 cards around. The core clock has been increased by 76MHz so it now runs at 851MHz, while the memory is clocked at 1.14GHz (2.28GHz effective).

The memory speed is interesting as Asus has taken a conservative approach to the overclocking of the memory, since the Samsung K4U52324QE-BC08 memory chips are rated at 2.40GHz; so you have a little room to try to push the card even further should you desire it.

Asus has stuck to the reference two-slot cooler design, the only difference being the sticker on the front of the cooler's plastic shield, which in this case has the graphics and logo from the Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts game (which is included as part of the software bundle with the card).

Although this is the cooler that our review card came with, on the Asus global Web site there's another version with a radial design cooler in place of the standard type, but with the same clock speeds.

Since powerful cards like this allow for playing games at high resolutions with lots of detail, we decided not to test at a 1,024 by 768 pixel resolution, but instead give the card a real workout by benching it with some of the latest, most powerful games at a couple of high resolutions; and with all the various games' detail levels set to maximum.

Using World in Conflict as a starting point we tested the EAH3870 TOP at a 1,600 by 1,200 resolution and got an average frame rate from the game's built-in benchmark of 19fps, a little behind Nvidia's 8800GT with 25fps but ahead of a standard HD3870's 15fps.

At a 2,048 by 1,536 resolution the EAH3870 TOP closes the gap to the Nvidia card, with 28fps as opposed to the 8800GT's 32fps. It also does well with the killer of graphics cards, Crysis, with an average frame rate of 24fps at 1,600 x 1,200 and 15fps at a 2,048 x 1,538 resolution. The latter is hardly playable, but the fact it actually gets into double figures at such a high resolution in Crysis is an achievement.

Besides the Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts game the box includes an Asus utility and driver CD, while on the hardware side you get DVI-to-HDMI and DVI-to-VGA converters, a CrossFire connector, an S-Video to composite adapter, a component adapter and a 6-pin PCI-Express power converter.

At last there is a competitor for Nvidia's mighty GeForce 8800GT, and a well priced one at that. But the performance of the factory-overclocked EAH3870, however close to the 8800GT, still can't knock the king of the mid-range cards off its perch.