Shane Baxtor03 July 2008, 12:00 PM
Outstanding performance, understanding price tag.
AMD have
really taken its time since the launch of the HD 3870 back in November of last
year to work on creating a truly next generation graphics card. The only
exception to this was the HD 3870 X2 which was released in January of this
year. NVIDIA on the other hand have been so busy trying to take attention away
from AMD that it has released model after model; it seems that this has
affected it with the GTX 280 not being the card that everyone thought it would
be.
The new HD
4800 series will consist of two cards; the higher end HD 4870 due out soon and
the card that will sit directly under it, the HD 4850 which is what we have
with us today. From a specifications viewpoint the HD 4850 really has it over
the older HD 3870, while being priced under $300 at launch. Looking at
transistors, we’re already up from 666 million to 965 million on the new HD
4850. Stream Processors also move extremely northward with 800, which is well
over double the 320 we saw on the HD 3870. The other important area that gets a
bump is Texture Units which again has more than doubled by moving from 16 to 40
on the new card.
Some areas
have remained the same, however; the new HD 4850 still uses the same 55nm
manufacturing process and Render Back Ends remain unchanged at 17. AMD must be
feeling confident with the above changes as it has moved from a 512-bit bus
back down to a 256-bit one. Clock speeds on the card also comes in a little
lower with the core being 625MHz; this is quite a fair bit down from the 775MHz
clock seen on the HD 4870. To help keep costs down and yield rates up, AMD have
moved back to GDDR3 on this model. The 512MB on board comes in at 2,000MHz and
there are already rumours floating around that 1GB models aren’t all that far
away.
The new HD
4850 only requires a single 6-pin PCI Express connector located at the back of
the card along with the two Crossfire connectors across the top of the card. At
load on our test system the card drew a maximum of 252W, which is fairly
standard for a mid-range card. If you add another HD 4850 into the mix, load
goes up to 349W.
Sapphire
has done a bit with the package by not only including the standard driver CD,
but also a copy of Power DVD, Cyberlink DVD Suite and a full version copy of
3DMark06. As far as extras go, instead of including a game you might not want,
Sapphire has chosen to give us a 2GB pen drive which will no doubt come in
handy.
Performance
is what it all comes down to, however, and the HD 4850 really manages to shine.
For the most part we see the single card setup performing similarly to an
overclocked 9800 GTX; sometimes faster, sometimes slower, yet a fair bit
cheaper. At 1,920 x 1,200 the single card is pushing out around 87FPS. WIC sees
a minimum of 24FPS and an average of 40FPS. If you’re on an X38 or X48-based
motherboard which carries two x16 slots, both physically and electronically
(P35/P45, while carrying two x16 slots for Crossfire, these only run at x8 each
when used together) and you enjoy gaming at higher resolutions, you may want to
look at adding a second HD 4850 to the mix. Under UT3 at 2,560 x 1,600 we see
the single card score move from 50FPS to 100FPS along with other games that are
able to make use of Crossfire; these seem to be getting gains ranging from 30%
to 80%.
After
getting right into the new HD 4850s over a weekend, there was only one flaw we
could find for the most part; the single slot cooler, while extremely handy, it
doesn’t help extract heat all that well with a single card coming in at 68C
under load and the second card when running in a pair being a very toasty 79C.
There is no doubt AMDs partners will be busy at work creating some larger
dual-slot coolers to bring those numbers way down.