Review of one of ATI latest graphics cards from its 4800 series.

Introduction

ATI's latest graphis card range is the 4800 series.  The two main cards to look out for in this range are the HD 4850 and the HD 4870.  Both are considered mid range cards because of their price.  The HD 4850 is the cheaper of the two, priced at £120.  You would expect a small £120 mid range graphics card to perform exaclty like that, especailly with the way ATI have been going with the recent 3800 series and 2900 series graphics cards which have been un able to compete with the Nvidia power houses as of late.  But and thats a big but looks can be deceiving. 

Product Features

Specifications

Packaging and contents

Front of the box has the image of a young lady on the front.  Also has the various ATI logo including one to tell you the card supports CrossfireX.  There is also some bits of info telling you the features the card has, shader model 4 support and PCIE 2.0 support for example. 

Back of the box has a list of product highlights and a small list tell you what you get in the box.

Left hand side of the box has a system requirments list that your PC needs to be able to run the card and the right hand side just has a sticker on telling you the part number etc.

Inside there is another brown box in which everything is kept.

Opening up we see the graphics card inside a anti static bubble wrap bag to protect the card.

Underneath the card is where you will find all the bundled accessories that come with the card..

You get the following.  Driver CD, installation guide, 1 x Crossfire bridge, 1 x molex to 6 pin power adapter, DVI to HDMI convertor, DVI to VGA convertor, 1 x s-video to composite adapter,  1 x s-video to component video adapter and a powered by Sapphire case sticker.

Up close and personal

Rear of the card.  Two DVI ports and the s-video port.

Front end of the card.  You can see the 6 pin powerheader.

The card has two Crossfire connectors so you can use more than two cards in Crossfire.

Rear of the card.

Two is always better than one.

Before

After

The core

Qimonda GDDR3 memory chips.  There is a total of 8 of these on the card.

Up close and personal with the cooler

The fan

The fan is 12V / 0.4A

The heatsink itself is all copper.

As you can see above the heatsink has no heat pipes, just a series of fins.  The back and part of the top are all open to allow the air the flow through the heatsink and out of the back.

The cooler case

The case itself is all plastic.  The rear of it has a few flame styled holes to allow the air to flow out better.   The front has no image of a goblin or a woman with a gun like you see on some coolers.  It just has the Sapphire logo and the name of the card on a mesh image back drop.  It does look really good, alot better than what you see on other stock coolers.

HD 4850 stock cooler against 9800 GTX stock cooler.

HD 4850 stock cooler against 9800GTX with Akasa Vortexx Neo

HD 4850 with Akasa Vortexx Neo

Performance

Test setup

Q6600 @ 3.4Ghz

DFI LanParty LT X48-T2R

4Gb OCZ

500Gb Samsung hard drive

Corsair HX 620W

Dimas Bench Table Rev2 Chilled PC special edition

Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate Edition with SP1

PNY 9800 GTX - Forceware 175.16

Sapphire HD 4850s - ATI Catalyst 8.6 with 4800 series hotfix

For the games where the in game benchmark was not used the same section of the game was ran through 5 times for one minute and Fraps was used to record the average fps.  The highest and lowest average fps were disregarded and the average from the 3 remaining results was taken. 

Results

Click the pictures to enlarge. 

3DMark 06

Test was run at default settings.  1280 x 1024 res, no AA.

HD 3850 - 11254

9800GTX  - 14393

HD 4850 - 13634

HD 4850 Crossfire - 18176

3DMark Vantage

Test was run at performance settings

HD 3850 - 4622

9800GTX - 5852

HD 4850 - 6959

HD 4850 Crossfire - 11186

Crysis

Test was run using the Crysis benchmark.  Settings where Very High, DX10, 4 x AA and 1920 x 1080 res.  Test was run 3 times and the overal average fps used.

HD 3850 - 7.61

9800GTX - 6.28 fps

HD 4850 - 11.06 fps

HD 4850 Crossfire - 17.59 fps

Bioshock

Click here for Bioshock settings. 

9800GTX - 56.08 fps

HD 4850 - 66.17 fps

HD 4850 Crossfire - 111.67 fps

HL2: Lost Coast

In game benchmark was used for this test.  Setting used can be seen here, res 1920 x 1200.

HD 3850 - 91.23

9800 GTX - 121.74 fps

HD 4850 - 136.41 fps

HD 4850 Crossfire - 139.19 fps

Company of Heroes

The in game benchmark was used and the settings used can be seen here.

HD 3850 - 22.1

9800GTX - 30.2 fps

HD 4850 - 37.4 fps

HD 4850 Crossfire - 54.2 fps

Call of Duty 4

Settings used can be seen here (graphics) and here (texture).

9800GTX - 49 fps

HD 4850 - 58.85 fps

HD 4850 Crossfire - 69.16 fps

Temperature 

Idle temp

Stock cooler - 67 °C

Stock cooler with Arctic Silver 5 - 57 °C

Akasa Vortexx Neo - 29 °C

Max temp

Stock cooler - 84 °C

Stock cooler with Arctic Silver 5 - 84 °C

Akasa Vortexx Neo - 41 °C

As you can see from the temperatures the card runs very very hot with the stock cooler.  The main reason for this is because the fan is stuck at 14% when idle and the fan reportdly doen't hit 100% until the temperature reachs 105 °C, at which point the thing would probabilly melt and you would be deaf.  At start up the fan is extremely loud.  Thankfully though the cooler is able to keep it below 90 °C under load, but still 90°C is very very hot.  The plastic case around the heatsink itself gets hot aswell.  It would probabilly start to melt if you left the card at 100% load for a couple days.  There is some of the heatsink at the top of the card that is not covered by the case and if you touch that when the card is under load it would probabilly brand you, it gets that hot.  The stock cooler isnt very good at all, until there is way of manually controlling the fan speed through Rivatuner for example I would advise that you get a thrid party cooler such as the Akasa Vortexx Neo to cool the card.  Even when you can manually control the fan speed I think it would be wise to use a third party cooler any way.

Conclusion

As you can see from the results the HD 4850 is an excellent card both on its own and as a pair.  The only situation where it is beaten by the 9800GTX is in 3DMark 06 but in everything else where it matters (in game) it comfortably beats the 9800GTX.  For a card that costs under £130 it offers amazing performance.  ATI have done what many people thought they wouldn't be able to and that is produce a series of cards that is not only able to compete with the Nvidia power houses but also offer more performance for less cash.

If you are looking for a cheap high performing card this is definalty the card to buy and if you have a bit of extra cash to get two cards then you wont be disappointed at all.

Small but mighty is the way to describe these cards, simply excellent.

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