Introduction:



It has been a while since the official launch of the ATI HD4850 videocard and many of you will probably have already a view on what the performance is of this card. Many media have already declared this card to be thé best price/performance choice and although we have no reason to not believe what the other media says, we at Madshrimps still want to experience the power of this card ourselves and give you our view on this matter. In the spirit of the famous saying: "If you assume, you make an ass out of you and me", let's have a look at the HD4850.

HD 4850 picturised:

Test setup

HD 4850 Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E8500 (from )
Cooling	Stock Aluminum Intel Heatsink
Mainboard	MSI P45 Platinum
Memory	2 * 1GB PC6400 Teamgroup
Other	Sapphire HD 4850 Gainward 9800GTX Antec 1000W Western Digital 320Gb SATA HDD Windows XP SP3 Dutch

Methodology: benchmarks

To compare all motherboards, we used the following benchmarks:

3DMark01

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

Aquamark

Quake4

Race driver GRID

Supreme Commander

Timeshift

Trackmania Nations

Unreal Tournament 3

The specific test conditions are mentioned in the following pages.

Methodology: settings

Futuremarks tests

These synthetic 3D benchmarks from Futuremark allow you to evaluate the expected performance of a system with different generations of games. As each 3DMark uses different features and quality settings, it allows you to get an idea of how your system will perform.



3DMark01

3DMark01 has become more and more a system benchmark rather than a graphics card benchmark over the years. Nowadays, you can really see the difference in DDR2 and DDR3 memory setups, high and low FSB setups and so on.



Due to 3DMark01 being cpu dependant, both cards perform pretty much the same.

3DMark03

3DMark03 is very GPU dependant, which comes down to: the more cores, the higher the score. SLI and CF performance increase is spectacular in this benchmark.



Non-overclocked, the HD4850 is noticeably slower than the 9800GTX, but with a little bit of overclocking you can outperform the Nvidia competitor quite easily.

3DMark05

This product of the 3DMark series is again more CPU dependant than its predecessor, meaning that an overclocked CPU will have a big influence on the end score.



Nvidia's 9800GTX is ruling in this one, even overclocking doesn't really help.

3DMark06

3DMark06 is known to stress the GPU to the maximum and provides SM2.0 and SM3.0 test to compare products.



In Futuremark's latest XP 3D benchmark, the 4850 is capable of beating it's direct competitor when overclocked, be it with a small margin.

Aquamark3

While this 3D benchmark is aging quickly, it still serves as a good evaluation tool for system performance, as it stresses the VGA, CPU and memory subsystem, any advantage had from a faster motherboard or memory setting will be apparent.



Small differences in the AM3 benchmark, the HD4850 is trailing the 9800GTX.

Timeshift

Scientists from the near-future have begun work on creating a viable time machine. The project results in the creation of two devices, the Alpha Suit, a less advanced prototype jump suit, and the Beta Suit, a more advanced, so-called military grade model with features the Alpha Suit lacks such as combat-related timeshifting abilities and an integrated AI designed to prevent the creation of Paradoxes.



We ran the fraps utility to record the FPS performance while running the game three times. Afterwards we averaged the results.





On medium resolution and details, the 9800GTX is noticeably faster than the HD4850, however, when we increase the resolution, the HD4850 can almost match the 9800GTX performance level.

Quake 4

Quake 4 was released in 2006, based on the popular Doom 3 engine from ID Software. Even with the latest video cards, this game is a hard nut to crack if running in highest possible settings. Luckily, if you're able to play at the highest settings is so astonishing you never want to downgrade your card again.



We made a custom timedemo which takes the most out of the cards and ran the timedemo a couple of time, the results were averaged.

We'll be testing the differences in 3D rendering in two set-ups:

1152x864 - High detail & 1280x1024 - Ultra





The Ati card is dominating in the Q4 benchmark, overpowering the 9800GTX in higher resoluting bit a large margin.

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance



This large scale RTS can really tax the most highest end of systems when you up the unit count into the thousands; while limited mostly to CPU speed (and showing love to Quad Cores) it can definitely do with a nice graphics card to be able to render all the GFX at high detail at high resolution and on multiple screens as the game supports dual monitor support!



We ran our performance test using the building benchmark which can be accessed by adding “/map Perftest” to the game’s shortcut.





Very small margin between both cards, although the HD4850 leads over the 9800GTX consistently

Trackmania Nations



A free game in the truest sense of the word, TrackMania Nations Forever lets you drive at mind-blowing speeds on fun and spectacular tracks in solo and multiplayer modes. Nations Forever will offer a new "Forever" version of the Stadium environment, a solid solo mode and 65 brand new, progressively difficult tracks. TrackMania Nations Forever will unite an even larger number of players than the original Nations thanks to its engaging multiplayer modes, innovative online functions and revolutionary interactivity between players.

We'll be testing the differences in 3D rendering in two set-ups:

1280x1024 - Medium quality & 1680x1050 - Very high quality





Same story as we've already seen: in higher resolutions, the HD4850 is scaling better than the 9800GTX.

Race Driver: GRID





The game runs on a modified in-house engine previously used by Colin McRae: DIRT. The similarities between the two games visually are noticeable. Grid adds a much more advanced damage model and several other improvements which makes it one of the best looking race games on PC.

We ran a few rounds on the Le Mans (circuit de la sarthe) track and measure the FPS with the Fraps utility.





The HD4850 is completely dominating in this game; the 9800GTX performs on a much lower level.

Unreal Tournament 3

Epic Games had quite a bit success with their Unreal Engine ; at first competing with the ID Tech engine for licensing they now seem to have pulled ahead with the latest incarnation : Unreal Engine 3. The list of games using this engine is huge with blockbuster titles like: Bioshock, Mass Effect, Gears of Wars, Rainbow Six Las Vegas (1&2) and of course their next iteration of the UT series, UT3.



While many games share the same Unreal 3 engine, the developers can decide how high the system requirements will be, by increasing the level of detail. Rainbow Six Las Vegas for example is known for being more demanding than Bioshock on the same hardware. Unreal Tournament 3 by Epic Games provides an amazing balance between image quality and performance, rendering beautiful scenes even on lower end hardware; on high end graphics cards you can really turn up the detail which makes it picture perfect.

We played three deathmatch rounds in the Defiance scene, using 15 bots.





The 9800GTX can keep up with the HD4850 in the higher resolution setting.

Temperature:

To be completely honest, I don't know for sure if ATI did so well on the cooling part of the HD4850 card. I know, it's a single slot cooler and people like silent solutions over noisy fans, but the heat load on the HD4850 is quite high. I ran the test setup out of its casing and I literally felt the heat of the card. In addition, I actually smelled the heat, as the plastic cover of the video card started to smell like it was melting. Of course, the card didn't melt, but the smell of the card didn't really make me sit comfortable next to the setup when running the tests.

The main problem of the heat load is the standard settings in CCC, Catalyst Control Center, where ATI has set the maximum fan speed to a mere 24%, which is a bit too little if you want a cool system. The trick of a cool and silent HD4850 system is pretty simple: find the right balance between temperature and noise level. We had a look at the temperatures with the fan spinning at 99% and yes, there was a noticeable difference. However ... the noise produced by the fan was not that great. I was expecting the setup to fly around the room when I first heard the fan at 99%.



To change the fanspeed, you need to alter the CCC profile manually as it's not possible to change the fanspeed in the CCC user interface. Here's a small how-to for changing the fan speed.

1) Create a profile in CCC, for instance 'FanHigh'
2) Open the XML of your profile with notepad.

XP: 'C:\Documents and Settings\YOURACCOUNT\Local Settings\Application Data\ATI\ACE\FanHigh.xml'

VISTA: 'C:\Users\YOURACCOUNT\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\FanHigh.xml'

3) Find the following lines in the XML file:

'Feature name="FanSpeedAlgorithm_0"
'Property name="FanSpeedAlgorithm" value="Automatic"

'Feature name="FanSpeedPercentTarget_0"'
'Property name="Want" value="29"

4) Change the following:

Automatic to manual

29 to the desired fan speed

5) Activate the profile FanHigh in CCC.

Power usage:

Power usage starts to be more and more important for end-users as global warming is threatening to extinct human life ... well, sort of. Whether or not you believe in global warming and whether or not you're willing to work on a healthier planet, the power usage is for most people only a matter of having a less expensive bill at the end of the month.



At first, you'd think that the higher the fan is spinning, the higher the power draw should be. However, because of the fan spinning at 99%, the temperatures drop and in the end, the power usage drops.

Pricing

To have a better view on the pricing ratings, we gathered data from Geizhals.eu (Europe) and Froogle.com (USA) and averaged out the prices.



The HD 4850 is a lot less costly than the 9800GTX, which makes it very good price/performance-wise.

Evaluation

When I read the first reviews of the HD4850, I instantly noticed how almost every media claimed that this is thé best card in the price/performance ratio class. It's quite obvious actually, because the card performs almost on par with the 9800GTX, in some tests even better, and it's very well priced. This kind of shows which direction AMD has chosen to follow, the direction that made the company as what it is today: not the absolute top product, but nearly unbeatable in the price/performance ratios. AMD already cut prices in the CPU segment, making it possible to buy quad cores at less than €100. To be honest, if you want a good gaming setup, you could consider the Spider platform: a Phenom processor and multiple HD 4000 series cards in Crossfire-X. You'd be amazed about the performance you get.

ATI HD 4850

+ Price
+ Performance
+ Single slot cooling solution
- Temperature
- Noise when fan at full speed

Ati HD4850 recommended for


Conclusive thoughts

Yes, the HD4850 is a price/performance hit. AMD did their best and improved the previous generation cards to make a very low-cost middle-end video card. Madshrimps will be conducting further tests with the HD 4850 and will compare it against the newer GTX 260 to see if the card is able to keep up. Furthermore, we will be spending time on overclocking the HD 4850 to the extreme.

To finish, I would like to thank Steeve from AMD and Barbara from Gainward for allowing us to re-use their 9800 GTX, MSI for the P45 Platinum and Tones.be, Belgium’s Biggest Hardware Shop for providing the Intel E8500 CPU.

'Till the next time, stay tuned!