The AMD Radeon HD 4850 is probably selling way before it's launch date on the 25th of this month. While we were first skeptical about it's performance overtaking the 8800 or 9800 series, it turned out to be otherwise. In fact, the more shocking truth is that it is almost on par or perform far better than the single card dual core NVIDIA 9800GX2.

In almost all the benchmarks we saw, we were stunned by it's performance, running without noise. We were stunned by not only the performance but also by the heat generated. In our test environment of 30 deg Celsius with air con turned on. The temperature registers 80 degrees Celsius on idle. After running the benchmarks, I touched the heatsink and it was so hot. We then noticed that the fan is spinning slowly. A check using GPU-Z, ATitool or ATi CCC shows that the temperature is indeed beyond 78 Deg when it runs. The fan speed is also running at 20% of it's full speed. So far, rivatuner cannot detect this card, thus we are unable to set the fan to a higher speed. Probably a BIOS editor can do that.

In terms of overclocking, we are able to o/c the GPU core to 690MHz from it's default of 625MHz. The GDDR3 is also pushed up to 1GHz just to ensure stability. We added a fan to blow at the card to cool down the car. We managed to o/c the card and score P7573 (5% oc) in 3Dmark Vantage, 13786 (5% oc) in 3DMark06 and 19319 (1.6%) in 3DMark05 boost in performance. I am sure the GPU Core can be pushed further if not for the low fan speed, we will not take chances to burn out our new shiny card just yet.

In terms of technology, the 4800 series supports the DX10.1 and SM 4.1 for gaming. If you intend to use the card as to decode AVC/H.264, you can use the it's DVI-HDMI converter and channel the 7.1 surround audio and video directly to your HDTV without relaying cabling within your casing.

In conclusion, this card is probably the best cost/performance mid range card that will bring the pricing of high end cards down to the 200-300USD level. In fact, we can see from the games benchmarks, the performance is not that bad after all, be it in a single or CrossFire setup.

Price ~ 200USD (Click the icons on the top and bottom of the page)

Pros

• Pretty quiet
• Low CPU utilisation when playing back Blu-Ray
• Supports  DX10.1 & SM4.1
• CrossFire X support

Cons

• Card runs hot due to 20% fan speed set in BIOS.
• No games included

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.