Sapphire HD 4850 review
The war between the Ati and nVidia cards is a never ending battle. Here is another card out in the market to continue the legacy of game cards. It’s rare occasion to have on test, on the same month, new generation products from two big rivals (nVIDIA and ATI). This is really good news because ATI had some serious delays with R600 and that is one of reasons why it was so indifferently received on market. ATI realized that now must roll up its sleeves to catch up nVIDIA, because at that point seemed that nVIDIA unreachably moved away.
Persistence is key thing in many situations and that can be applied to ATI. Now we have HD 3000 series with much better market acceptance thanks to low price and performances that are more than what you paid for. At that point, the first punch was made to nVIDIA. It shook up nVIDIA’s first lines and resulted in lower price for GeForce 8800GT and soon after that followed launch of G94 based graphics card that should compete with Radeon HD 3870. These were literary forced moves from nVIDIA which took defensive position. For some time “the truce” was established while companies have been working on new products as introduction to another new “clash”. It seems that ATI understood this game better than nVIDIA did. While nVIDIA was working on mega massive GTX280, ATI sat and thought what product should they launch on market but also to make it as much interesting to wide spectrum of possible buyers. Idea imposed itself easily because it actually represents desire of any buyer and that is “Fast, Cheap but also Top-Quality”. From three mentioned epithets you can usually satisfy only two of them, but ATI, as it seems, managed to reconcile these three favorite characteristics of any user.
We have tested Sapphire Radeon HD 4850, model that represents first commercial available GPU from new generation of Radeon HD 4000 and is marked as R770 GPU. We are talking about cheap but very fast card which is part of new ATI’s policy. ATI decided to leave multiGPU systems for top class but user can buy a card to play with for some time that is not overpriced and later on you have a possibility of purchasing another one or even more, depending from your affinity and upgrade your system easily. Trump card that ATI used is 55nm technology process that actually results in GPU surface area from 260mm2, half less then surface of GTX280 is. Nevertheless, ATI succeed to pack 956 million transistors on such a small space. Number of Stream Processors is also increased regarding previous generation, but– number of SP is 800! Yes, you read exactly, eight hundred, but every fifth works with all functions and there are actually 160 of them. Of course, number of texture units was also increased considerably and there are 40 of them. ROPs are still present in same amount as before -16. Improvements were done on every step and true example for that are SIMD cores consisted of 80SPs with 16KB cache memory, L1 cache and four dedicated texture units. Of course, 55nm technology process means less consumption and in case of Radeon HD 4850 it sums around 110W, which is a huge step forward. R770 cards has support as for GDDR3 as for GDDR5 with 256bit memory bus bandwidth.
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Model HD 4850 that we have tested is signed by Sapphire, premium ATI partner, so there is no room for amazement because that is the first model of HD 4850 that came to our lab. Card has standard dimensions, like the ones that are used for Radeon HD 3850 and same goes for cooling solution. Cooling system is almost identical to one that used HD 3850 as reference. By our opinion this is a problem, because card very easily reached temperatures from almost 100°C (212°F). The problem exists because situation doesn’t change a lot even when card “stands still”. When card is in idle state GPU clock is miserable 160MHz, but temperature is even than over 70°C (158°F). Even though there are some small improvements done on cooling profile we can hope that there will be manufacturers that will offer their original cooling solutions. In package with card you will find basic equipment like cables, discs with drivers etc. Version with much richer bundle will exist but we are sure that price will also follow accordingly. Clocks for Sapphire HD 4850 are 625MHz for core and 1986MHz for memory. Naturally we tried to overclock it, but we soon stopped at 675 MHz for core and 2160MHz for memory. Performance jump was adequate and with better cooling it seems possible to expect even better results.
Performances
We must admit that we very much liked performances that provides Radeon HD 4850 512MB because for announced price from around 180€ for basic model you will get incredibly great performances. Bear in mind that price has a constant tendency of dropping down and as huge number of CROSSFIRE motherboards are available on market, adding one more card is real option. Performances with two graphics cards are very well scaled which means that you will feel acceleration. The only fault of this card is warming up mentioned above, but with better cooling system even that should not be a problem.
| Sapphire Radeon HD4850 | 1680×1050 4xAA 16xAF (single card) |
1280×1024 4xAA 16xAF (single card) |
1680×1050 8xAA 16xAF (CrossFireX) |
| Clock [GPU(SP)/MEM] | 625MHz / 1.986MHz | 625MHz / 1.986MHz | 625MHz / 1.986MHz |
| 3DMark05 | 14.789 | 19.141 | 20.037 |
| 3DMark06 (SM2.0/SM3.0/Final Score) | 3.633 / 3.656 / 9.555 |
3.964 / 4.297 / 10.673 | 5.997 / 6.059 / 14.703 |
| Lost Planet EC (Snow / Cave) | 32,9 / 70,7 fps | 46,3 / 70,7 fps | 86,8 / 100,8 fps |
| WIC (HighQ) |
40 fps |
48 fps |
43 fps |
| Crysis(HighQ) | 26.6 fps |
33.5 fps |
47.5 fps |
| Unreal Tournament 3 (HighQ) | 51.9 fps |
66.6 fps |
93.3 fps |
| Call of Juarez | 62.9 fps | 75.8 fp |
64.7 fps |
| Prey | 177.5 fps |
196.3 fps |
180.8 fps |
Source http://www.insidehw.com/Reviews/Graphics-cards/Sapphire-HD-4850/Page-4.html