It’s hard to justify spending over $500 just to get a single game like Crysis to run. However, that’s just what we’ve been doing over the last while as NVIDIA pretty much had the run of the market place, pushing out GPUs at unheard of price points, punishing gamers and their wallets. Then things changed in June this year as AMD released a new series of GPUs starting with their 4850. NVIDIA’s response? Cut prices like crazy and hope that people would ignore AMD. However, as benchmarks and reviews started showing up, it was clear that NVIDIA had more to worry about than just price points.
As one of the launch partners, GIGABYTE was one of the first to embrace AMD’s new GPU product. Except for the obligatory cool artwork of an Anime Princess on the box and a sticker on the cooler, their 4850 based product known as the GV-R485-512H-B is a 100% clone of the AMD reference design. There’s nothing wrong with this as the reference design is actually very good, utitlizing a single slot fan which makes it possible to save some space for other add in cards. What GIGABYTE has done though, at least in this neck of the woods, is ensure adequate supply of these GPU’s at extremely competitive prices (with rebates), to get them into the hands of gamers and we’ve got one in our hands. Let’s check it out and see what’s got NVIDIA all hot and bothered.
Features and Specifications
In a nutshell, the 4850 GPU core is a highly tweaked version of last year’s RV670 core, now called the RV770. This new core features upgrades over last year’s product which includes an increase from 320 stream processors to a whopping 800. The new core also features a jump from 666 million transistors to over 956 million, on the same 55nm production process and also supports all the way up to GDDR5 memory on the 4870. For more specifications on the 48xx series core, you can check out the AMD Spec Page.
GIGABYTE’s HD 4850 will have the GPU will be clocked to 625MHz while the 512MB of onboard GDDR3 memory will hit 990MHz out of the box. Like all reference based 4850 cards, GIGABYTE’s GV-R485-512H-B will support CrossFireX with all 48xx series based video cards, including the 4870’s and even the 48xxX2 variants. Mixed GPU CrossFire with 38xx series cards has been rumoured, but has not been enabled in any available drivers as of this writing.
What’s In The Box?
In order to keep the price down, GIGABYTE has gone with just the basics in the box which include a DVI to VGA dongle, DVI to HDMI dongle, Component and Composite video output adapter, MOLEX to PCI-E adapter and a CrossFire bridge. A basic manual and driver CD are also included. There are no games or extra stuff in the box.
Although having the bare minimums in the box to keep the price down isn’t a bad thing, this does make things harder for GIGABYTE. Not only do they have to compete on price, but they have to ensure that retailers always have these in stock as pretty much any brand of HD 4850 is a substitute. In a sense, this is good for you and me because we’ll always be able to find one somewhere and because there are so many substitutes, prices should be fairly aggressive.
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First Impressions
As mentioned, GIGABYTE’s HD 4850 is completely reference right down to the single slot cooler. Again, it’s not a bad thing, especially since the design works. As a single slot design, it also helps you squeeze in extra expansion cards and makes the eventual jump to CrossFireX a lot easier since you’ll be able to install up to four of them more easily on a wider range of boards. The only downside is for GIGABYTE: The sticker actually started peeling off revealing the reference cooler’s original graphic.
Due to the power efficient design, the GIGABYTE HD 4850 uses just one single PCI-E 6 pin power cable to give it the juice it needs. This means that fairly modest systems with reasonably sized power supplies will be able to use this card.
Although this has never caused an actual problem for me, GIGABYTE has gone ahead and fitted protective caps to all the unused connectors on the card. It’s a nice touch, but it isn’t a deal breaker for me. However, I have noticed that almost every other video card manufacturer is doing this with their cards so why be the odd man out I guess.
One thing that all video card manufactures are guilty of is the liberal slopping of paste onto the heatsink and chip. Although this isn’t something that I can single out GIGABYTE for, it is a well known fact that the proper application of a little bit of heatsink paste (versus slopping it on like toothpaste) can improve the thermal performance of the heatsink. Of course this can be fixed easily, but it’d be nice to pop off a heatsink one day and see it applied properly.
The GDDR3 memory chips are attached to the heatsink with thermal tape, but the tape is so thick that it makes it impossible to properly apply proper heatsink paste due to the gap between the memory and the heatsink that is taken up by the thick tape. Again, it’s not something I can pin on GIGABYTE, but wouldn’t it be great to see a video card all done up properly out of the box with the right amount of heatsink paste?
System Setup
In order to test out our GIGABYTE HD 4850, we put together our own itsy bitsy Spider Platform. Parts included:
- AMD Phenom 9900E 2.6GHz Quad Core CPU (Provided by AMD)
- Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard (Provided by ASUS)
- CORSAIR XMS2 DHX 4GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit (Provided by CORSAIR)
- Western Digital Velociraptor WD3000GLFS Hard Drive (Provided by Western Digital)
- HighSpeedPC Top Deck Tech Station (Provided by HighSpeedPC)
- ANTEC Quattro 1000 Watt Power Supply (Provided by ANTEC)
We’ll also be basing our comparisons on the HD 4850’s older bigger brother, the HD 3870 using a Sapphire ATOMIC HD3870 Video Card. This card sports 512MB of GDDR4 memory and is overclocked out of the box to 825MHz Core and 1200MHz Memory vs the GIGABYTE HD 4850’s 625MHz Core and 990MHz GDDR3 Memory speed. Our operating system of choice was Windows Vista Premium 64 bit. All tests were run at 1920 x 1200 to take the emphasis off the CPU and make the GPU do most of the work. We used the latest drivers currently available, Catalyst 8.8 on both cards and for all tests.
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Synthetic Benchmarks
To start off our benchmarking and testing, we employed our two favourite synthetic benchmarks: 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage. Starting off with 3DMark06, which is a full on DirectX 9 benchmark, we achieved a composite score of 9705 with our GIGABYTE HD 4850 while the Sapphire ATOMIC HD 3870 put down 7807. On the 3DMark Vantage, which is a full on DirectX 10 benchmark, the GIGABYTE HD 4850 takes the lead again with a score of 2709 versus the 1203 of the Sapphire ATOMIC HD3870, in the GPU portion of the High Quality benchmark. As we can see, the DX9 tests are quite a bit closer than the DX10 benchmarks so it will be interesting to see how this holds up in the game benchmarks.
Game Benchmarks
In order to see what kind of performance this card brings us, we ran a number of benchmarks on games that we actually play. First we’ll throw down some benchmarks to see how the HD 4850 compares to the HD 3870 that we have on hand, then we’ll bring in our comments on the actual game play experience. Afterall, we don’t play benchmarks, we play games.
Unreal Tournament III
Starting off with the DirectX 9 titles, we take on Unreal Tournament III to see how this new GPU performs. We used HardwareOC’s UT3 benchmark tool to run our tests. We ranked the resolution to 1920×1200 and used the highest settings for quality. As the 3DMark06 benchmark foretold, the race would be fairly tight and we were able to see a score of 32 FPS emerge from the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870 after an average of three loops using the HALO 3 looking Containment benchmark map with BOTS enabled.
The GIGABYTE HD 4850 threw down and came away with a slightly higher score of 34 FPS after a three run average. Gaming performance in real world play was difficult to distinguish as the the difference in frames per second was so minimal. We’d have to call this battle a draw. However, both cards offered smooth performance in real world playing.
Half Life 2: Episode 2
The super solid Source engine used in Half LIfe 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and the upcoming Left4Dead was the basis of our next round of benchmarks. It is also a DirectX9 based game so it will be interesting if the 3DMark06 predictions hold true. Using HardwareOC’s Half Life 2: Episode 2 benchmark, we cranked the settings up and the resolution to 1920×1200 and let’er rip. As foretold by 3DMark06, the scores were going to be pretty close. The SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870 put down 67.8 FPS after a total of three runs while the GIGABYTE HD 4850 put down 68.4 FPS. Again, I’d call this a tie as a quick game with either GPU showed little to no differences in actual game play performance.
Company of Heroes
Company of Heroes will test the DirectX 10 performance of our two cards. So far, 3DMark06 has correctly predicted the outcome of our DirectX 9 titles, so let’s see how well the new 3DMark Vantage does at its performance predictions. Like all our other tests, we ran at a resolution of 1920×1200 and we used max quality settings. We used the in-game benchmark to carry out our tests and took an average of three runs to come up with our numbers.
Starting with the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870, we pull down an average FPS of 21, a max FPS of 49.5 and a min score of 10.3 FPS. This is below the average 30 FPS sweetspot that should allow smooth gameplay. The GIGABYTE HD 4850 pulled down an average score of 28.7 FPS, a max FPS of 60.2, and a minimum FPS score of 15.5. Real world play confirmed that the GIGABYTE, with its 28.7 FPS average, was quite a bit smoother in gameplay than the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870.
Crysis
When it comes to GPU punishment, Crysis cannot be ignored. This game has really pushed GPUs and has helped AMD’s competior, NVIDIA, sell a lot of GPUs at ridiculous prices in the quest of being able to reach a playable frame rate. We employ the help of HardwareOC’s Crysis Benchmark Tool to carry out our testing. We ran all tests at 1920×1200 and at all four quality settings: Low, Medium, High and Very High. We took an average of three runs to compute our results with each card and we were pretty surprised by the results.
- SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870 – Low: 30.09 / Medium: 17.07 / High: 13.45 / Very High: 9.26
- GIGABYTE HD 4850 – Low: 29.97 / Medium: 16.72 / High: 13.68 / Very High: 10.79
So the results don’t look so clear unfortunately. While the 3DMark Vantage score agrees with the Company of Heroes score in DX10, Crysis has completely confused us. The scores are so close that we’ll have to call this one a tie on the single GPU side.
Supreme Commander
For our Real Time Strategy testing, we chose Supreme Commander. Supreme Commander’s in-game benchmarking tool allows us to easily compare the performance of our two GPU’s by spitting out a composite score. The lower the score, the better the performance. Though RTS titles are typically more CPU and memory dependant, the GPU does have influence in the overall performance.
As a DX9 title and as foretold by our previous results, the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870 put down a composite score of 40.6 while the GIGABYTE HD 4850 put down a score of 35.7. This is in keeping with our expectations of the sort of gap we’d end up with. In our short gaming sessions on both GPUs, we weren’t able to discern any real world differences in gameplay. Both GPU’s produced very playable results in the real world.
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
To see how things shape up in the MMORPG world, we took on Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. This MMORPG is visually enthralling and we wanted to see just how well it would do in this demanding game. Though currently a DX9 title, plans are underway to push out a patch that will give it DX10 features. But for now, it’s all DX9.
Using FRAPS, we ran from the gate located outside the war torn settlement outside of Conarch Village to the first enemy camp on the other side of the battlefield. Since MMORPG’s are heavily influenced by how congested the interwebs are, we made sure that we took off at the same latency and the same frame rate as measured by the game’s built in meter. Our results were taken from an average of three runs with each GPU.
Our SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870 gave us an average frame rate of 18 FPS and a max framerate of 25 FPS. The GIGABYTE HD 4850 put down an average of 22.9 FPS with a max frame rate of 30 FPS. A quick thirty minute MMORPG break with both cards put the GIGABYTE HD 4850 ahead of the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870 in real world game play. Though lag might have some bearing on the results, the overall experience with the HD 4850 was noticeably smoother.
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Overclocking the GIGABYTE HD 4850
With the stock heatsink solution onboard, we weren’t expecting much in the way of a good overclock, but we did manage to take the stock 625MHz Core/990MHz Memory to a stable 690MHz Core/1088MHz Memory. Now here’s the kicker. Despite the overclock, none of the tests we ran again showed anymore than a sub 1% performance difference and yes, this included uber Crysis. Oh well.
Power Consumption
With the added transistor count, there is no doubt that power consumption would go up. Under load, our GIGABYTE HD 4850 powered system put down power consumption numbers of 289 WATTS compared to the 280 WATTS of our SAPPHIRE ATOMIC HD 3870 powered system. The good news is that you won’t need a kilowatt power supply to run this card.
Image Quality
One thing that seems totally left out of most reviews in search of ultimate FPS or composite score is actual commentary on the image quality. Seriously, does anyone even care anymore? I certainly do. On both my DELL 2405 24 Inch Monitor and my Samsung 245BW 24 inch monitor, the winner of the image quality duel between our two AMD powered brothers was a tie. Both the Sapphire ATOMIC HD 3870 and the GIGABYTE HD 4850 put down similar image quality in both 2D and 3D. Though it has been years since we could call the output quality of any card “ugly”, I have to say that when it came down to picture quality, it was easy to tell the NVIDIA picture from the AMD powered picture. In fact, I was rather surprised by what I had observed.
After staring at my EVGA 8800ULTRA SLI powered gaming rig for weeks, wasting away my time on Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and then switching over to our GIGABYTE HD 4850 test rig for the testing, I was floored. I tried switching screens, cables, anything I could possibly do to explain the increase in picture quality from my the 8800ULTRA to the HD 4850 and I finally came to the conclusion that AMD has kicked serious ass in tweaking the picture quality in their reference design. I know that in the quest to get those extra frame per second, this is the last thing on our minds, but when you spend enough time on an MMORPG, and you’re looking around for resources to gather, you really do notice this sort of thing and it was really noticeable.
Outside of games, text and graphics did look a little sharper when browsing web pages and manipulating graphics on the AMD side as well. However, it’s worth noting that it really isn’t a deal breaker on the 2D side. If you’re anal retentive about picture quality and you’re pushing high resolutions like we were at 1920×1200, this is something definitely worth considering.
Final Thoughts
It’s clear that AMD is back in the game when it comes to graphics. Not only have they redeemed themselves from a somewhat lackluster 38xx and Phenom launch last year, but they gave us the gift of an entry level GPU this year that exceeds the performance of last year’s top end product. They’ve also managed to do it for well under $200 (sub $159 if you look hard). Best of all, this isn’t even their top end product as the 4870, 4870×2’s and 4850×2’s are all currently doing battle as well. This has driven their main rival, NVIDIA, into severe price cutting mode as they really went to town raising their prices while AMD was regrouping. To see 9800GTX based cards get their prices halved because of this GPU is pretty telling of how serious AMD’s latest crop of GPUs are.
Performance wise, we have a card with a very substantial value to performance ratio. Although we were pushing this card to the limit with 1920×1200 resolutions and the highest quality settings, in many cases, you could still enjoy the gameplay and the eye candy. At lower resolutions, you should even be able to turn on a bit of Anti-Aliasing, but no matter what, it’s still pretty amazing to see how well something that should be worth over $350 on the NVIDIA pre-HD 48xx pricing scale, do it at nearly half that. Also, GIGABYTE themselves have not only ensured ample supply of this video card in the channel, but they too have been responsible for the aggressive pricing, making it more affordable for everyone.
At the end of the day, this card’s performance and price point make it pretty unbeatable making it an affordable upgrade for anyone who wants to game without a second mortgage. This makes an upgrade down the road to CrossFireX even more affordable as prices drop down the road. With surprisingly stellar image quality to top it off, I have to give this card a strong recommendation and also give it our value added award.
Pros
- Sub $200 price point makes a second mortgage unnecessary
- Great playable performance in games new and old
- Some of the best image quality that I’ve seen in a while
Cons
- At this price and this level of performance, really none. If I had to make something up, maybe GIGABYTE could throw in a game?
Overall Rating: 9.0 / 10.0
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