You have probably read our review on the PowerColor 4850 review. Thus you are already aware of the performance levels of the card against the others. The card's performance already overtook 8800 or 9800  and in CrossFire, it can even run faster than dual core NVIDIA 9800GX2.Today, AMD will officially announce the AMD 4800 Series. Judging from the reviews on the net, this card is one of the best value for money card.

In almost all the benchmarks we saw, we were stunned by it's performance, running without noise. We were also stunned. 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.

We tested many ways of getting the fan speed up to cool the GPU. That includes trying ways to add more voltage to the fan. To our surprise, ASUS actually provide a tool for doing that. This tool call "SmartDoctor" allows you to control the fan speed at various temp levels or you can set it to AUTO which runs the fan at 50% speed (will give you 50 deg Celsius on idle). Another interesting option in this tool is that it now allows you to select beyond the 1000MHz for it's GDDR3. The GPU Core slider maxes out at 700MHz.

With this tool, we did an experiment, we set the fan speed to 50% (Auto) and GPU actually gradually climbs up to 88 Deg Celsius after running 10 minutes of ATitools 3D view. When we set it to 22% (default), the GPU started at 76 Deg Celsius and climbs up to 105 Deg Celsius.

In terms of overclocking, we are able to o/c the GPU core to 700MHz from it's default of 625MHz. The GDDR3 is also pushed up to 1.2GHz. As we can now tune the fan speed, we set it to manual mode, running it at 100% Full Speed.

For overclocking, we scored the following.

The numbers are correct. It seems that running the DDR3 beyond the 1GHz results in a lower score for both 3Dmark06 and Vantage. Perhaps we could try it closer to 1GHz.

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

• Tempertature and Overclocking tool
• Low CPU utilisation when playing back Blu-Ray
• Supports  DX10.1 & SM4.1
• CrossFire X support

Cons

• No games included

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.