Published in Reviews

Sapphire HD 4850 shows its teeth

by on19 June 2008

Index


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Review:
Tails 9800 GTX


We already told you bits and pieces about Sapphire's HD 4850 GDDR3 card with 512MB memory, and since we worked extra hard we managed to get a few scores for you.

The card is, as we said, clocked at 625MHz core and 1986MHz 256 bit GDDR3 memory and it naturally has 512MB of this precious integrated circuitry.

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The GPU behind the card is something that we knew as RV770PRO and it surprisingly has a massive 956 million transistors. This is more than forty percent more than 666 mililion, the odd number that ATI had with RV670, or 43.5 percent more than the previous chip.

The chip is developed in 55nm process by TSMC and, of course, it supports DirectX 10.1 and Shader model 4.1. The GPU has 16 ROPs and it costs $199 in the U.S. e-tail, or about €150 to €180 in the EU, depending on the country and VAT.

The card itself looks almost identical to the good old Radeon 3850 and the cooler is actually the same. The card gets hot and reaches up to 80 degrees Celsius, which is acceptable for this card, but beware as you can be burned. At the same time its single-slot cooler is very quiet.

Being a single slot card isn’t an advantage, you simply get a lot of heat that you need to take out of your case. We hope someone will make a dua- slot card, as this would definitely get things cooler.

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The two DVI’s support HDMI over DVI, including 7.1 sound or VGA, depending which way you want to go. The GDDR3 memory is from Qimonda model number HYB18H512321BF-10 and the chips work at 1ns which is enough for 2GHz clock. The die size of RV770 is 256 mm², which is just a fraction of 576 mm², which is the size of GT200.

The card also has a single 6-pin power connector and during testing our whole testbed was happy with up to 270W, which is a great score for a Core 2 duo 6800 system with 680i board.

We didn’t have too much time to test many applications but we’ve tested 3Dmarks and a few games, including the almighty Crysis. Of course, we compared this with Radeon 3870 X2, 3870 and 3850 but please note that they were tested with the 8.5 driver as we simply didn’t have time to update it, as the new driver is out since last night.

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We also tested a few Nvidia cards, including 8800GT and 9800GTX which are the main competitors of this card. Before we forget about it, ATI is using a TeraFlop marketing gag, as this is the first card to go over that magical number, but you should really care more about frames per second.




Testbed:

Motherboard:
EVGA 680i SLI (Provided by EVGA)

Processor:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition (Provided by Intel)

Memory:
OCZ FlexXLC PC2 9200 5-5-5-18  (Provided by OCZ)
        during testing CL5-5-5-15-CR2T 1066MHz at 2.2V

PSU:
OCZ Silencer 750 Quad Black (Provided by OCZ)

Hard disk:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB SATA (Provided by Seagate)

CPU-Cooler:
Freezer 7 Pro (Provided by Artic Cooling)

Case Fans:
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 12 PWM
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 8 PWM

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Futuremarks


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Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 in 3DMark is about 480 points weaker than 9800GTX, and it is significantly slower than its dual-chip brother, the 3870 X2. It is faster than all previous ATI cards and 8800GT, 9800GT and even 8800GTS. At the same time, we’ve learned that 3Dmark is not always the best tool to show you the real performance of the card, as games matter.

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Sapphire's Radeon 4850 in Company of Heroes loses to Geforce 9800GTX. Radeon 4850 now works much better with FSAA on, especially compared to previous generation HD 3x00 cards. Radeon 4850 comes close, but Nvidia clearly wins this one.

Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 is up to 41 percent slower than 4850 with FSAA on and only 13 percent slower without FSAA. The real power of Radeon HD 48x0 series is clearly its superior FSAA performance. Radeon HD 3870 is about 11 percent faster than this mainstream card and this means that ATI did a good job with its new chip, as it managed to put a lot of power in this single, almost billion-transistor heavy chip.


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In Crysis Radeon HD 4850 can get close or even win versus 9800GTX but only if you turn the FSAA and Aniso on. Even when 9800GTX wins, it wins by a very small margin. Geforce 8800GT is clearly slower, sometimes by as much as 18 percent.

The real shocker is that in Crysis Radeon HD 4850 scores much faster than Radeon 3870 X2 or any other RV670 card. Crysis is the game that really makes this card looks good, especially if you have in mind that at this time this card costs about 33 percent less than 9800GTX.

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In Fear, the score of Radeon HD 4850 is up to 46 percent better compared to Radeon HD 3870; but at the same time it is up to 27 percent slower 3870 X2.

With Antialiasing or without it Radeon HD 4850 can win versus 9800GTX, and at the same time it leaves the 8800GT in the dust.

Conclusion

ATI did a great job with this new generation. It showed us that it can get back in the game. Geforce 9800GTX is a tough competitor, but in some cases the $199 priced Radeon HD 4850 can win against the 9800GTX and it clearly wins against the previous price performance king, the Geforce 8800GT.

It is great to see that ATI's FSAA performance is much better and this is a no brainer, as RV770 finally has the FSAA unit working, while RV670 did all its FSAA stuff via Shaders which are necessary and slower. This was the only way to make the FSAA to work and now this belongs to the past.

The card gets extremely hot, but the chip works very stable and this shouldn't concern you, but we warned that you can burn yourself by touching the cooler after a lot of gaming.


This is a positive step and you can expect that Radeon HD 4870 will be some 10 to 15 percent faste,r which would be enough to clearly beat Geforce 9800GTX and get close to the still unavailable Geforce GTX 260.

At this time this is probably the best priced performance card and we can highly recommend it, but in next days Nvidia will make its price moves and will introduce the 55nm of G92 which might change the game again. For $199, or between €150 and €180 suggested e-tail price in Europe, we can heavily recommend it.

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Last modified on 20 June 2008
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