Looking back at 2007, it seems amazing now how ATI has bounced back into the limelight when everyone thought NVIDIA was eating the competition up. Their major comeback was with their HD 3800 series and its competitive pricing. Fast forward to today, ATI is still going in that direction with their latest HD 4800 series, but now they might be able to put up a fight in the performance war finally. Presenting to you the HD 4850 from MSI!
As always, whenever we get something new, we talk about what’s new. The HD 4850 is based on the RV770 core, which is a 55nm-based GPU with a die size of an incredible 256 mm², which is half the size of the GT200 chip; 576 mm² to be exact. What’s more surprising is the fact that the HD 4850 has 800 unified shaders! This is a big jump from what was previously suggested in their roadmaps, which was 320 shaders. Also, ATI has stated that the RV770 is able to support GDDR5 memory. However, the current cards that AMD have shipped out come with GDDR3 only. Plans to incorporate GDDR5 memory will only come later on. The HD 4850 comes with 512MB on a 256-bit interface, while its core and memory speeds are 625MHz and 993MHz respectively. Last but not least, the card now comes with support of 7.1 audio through HDMI; previous generation cards only supported 5.1 audio.
The card is very slim and thin. Based on a single-slot design, ATI uses a flat pure copper plate to cool the GPU, memory chips and what not. Now the card is extremely quiet, this is of course due to the size of the fan being small, which would lead to another assumption – overheating. The card was very hot during heavy load, with temperatures rising above 80°C. Even at idle, the card’s temperature was 68°C. So it’s important to make sure you have good ventilation inside your casing. The card supports quad CrossFire configurations, and it being thin is a very useful. MSI hasn’t done any overclocking with the card so speeds you get on the MSI R4850 are stock speeds.
Just as a reminder, we’ve started using 3DMark Vantage, and are now testing Crysis and World in Conflict on 1,280×1,024 and 1,680×1,050. On Vantage, the card produced a score of 6,753 on Performance preset and 4,209 on High preset. From the scores chart we have, the HD 4850 has definitely surpassed the HD 3870 by about two thousand points on Vantage. Previous testing with ATI Radeon cards had resulted with texturing problems due to some driver issues. Thankfully, the drivers that came with the card was perfect. Better yet, the card performed really well even at a higher resolution as you can see from the FPS table.
The HD 4850 is now ATI’s star player. Sources from other sites have stated that the HD 4850 performs better than the GeForce 8800GT and 9800GTX. However, at the time of this writing, recent news have shed light that NVIDIA is coming up with the 9800GTX+, which is an improved variation of the G92 core while offering competitive pricing. We won’t know whether the 9800GTX+ will indeed give us value for our money, but for now, the MSI R4850 is the best deal you can get.
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