With the release of Nvidia’s 8800GT, budget gamers were given a taste of high end chips without the shelling out massive bucks. Not to be left behind, AMD unveils it’s bet on the middle class range, the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series.

Flaunting the first Microsoft’s DirectX 10.1 support, the AMD ATI Radeon HD 3800 is built on 55nm process technology with tri- and quad- multi-GPU support with ATI CrossFireX for your heavy duty processing needs.AMD’s 3800 family will launch with two initial cards, the 3850 and the 3870. The difference for each card is as follows:

ATI Radeon HD 3850 (MSRP $179)

• 256MB GDDR3
• 900 MHz Memory Clock
• 670 MHz Core
• 256-bit bus

ATI Radeon HD 3870 (MSRP $219)

• 512MB GDDR4
• 1.2 GHz Memory Clock
• 775+ MHz Core
• 256-bit bus

The new cards will be the industry’s first 55nm GPUs featuring 666 million transistors each, compared to ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT which hosts 700 million 80nm transistors. According to AMD, the move to a smaller processing node results in less power leakage and leads to the HD 3870 having less than half the power draw of the HD 2900 XT.

AMD will also introduce PowerPlay and ATI OverDrive technologies in its new processors. ATI OverDrive allows users to overclock their HD 3800 video cards through ATI Catalyst software. PowerPlay adjusts engine and memory clocks along with voltage levels to optimize GPU utilization.

Both cards have peak board power at 105 Watts, and operating noise at 34 dBA, include 320 stream processors, 16 texture units, and 16 render back-ends.

If you’re interested on how the 3870 goes head to head with the 8800, check out Legion Hardware’s review.

The bottom line? If you’re short on budget the 3800 line will serve your purpose. However, if you’re looking for more punch to power your games like Crysis, by all means jump to the 8800GT.