Techreport 4850 review (spanking the 9800gtx and close to 260gtx)

[marvelous211]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14967

9800gtx takes a beating here. Looks like 4870 might be able to beat 260 after all. Looking at some of the bandwidth limited situations is where 4850 starts to lose its momentum vs 260gtx.

 

[Maziar]

Nice find, thanx

 

[Maziar]

another one :
http://www.hothardware.com/News/ATI_Radeon_HD_4850_RV770_Sneak_Peek/

Well it beats the 9800GTX in almost every benchmark but the difference isn't very much bit it has a very good price

 

[pcgamer12]

Christopherr, stop spamming. You just made a new account huh? Everybody knows your old one with "Power Index".

 

[kelfen]

Wow.. what an awsome series.

 

[kelfen]

Wow.. what an awsome series.

ATI really got it rigth... They fixed up the 38xx's and made a beast of a card.

 

[xx12amanxx]

Christopherr, stop spamming. You just made a new account huh? Everybody knows your old one with "Power Index".

The fanboi's just cant handle the fact that ATI released a better smaller more power saving higher performing quieter card at the 200$ price point than Nvidia would have let go at the 400$ price point.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

I was waiting for this review, wish I had time to read it, oh well after work.

Oh, dang, no technical details, guess they're waiting for the HD4870 for that.

 

[marvelous211]

I was waiting for this review, wish I had time to read it, oh well after work.

Oh, dang, no technical details, guess they're waiting for the HD4870 for that.

Scott didn't write this article. He was probably busy writing 280gtx so no details. maybe when 4870 comes out.

 

[prochobo]

Awesome. This is exactly what I was looking for. Cheap and fast. [flash=0,0]http://crunkentertainment.com/img5.jpg[/flash]I wonder how it will do when OCed.

 

[ovaltineplease]

Don't you find it odd that most websites show the 4850 behind the gtx260 or just above the 9800GTX in 22"-24" res, yet this site shows the 4850 beating the gtx260 single gpu vs single gpu in Call of duty 4 at 22" and near matching it at 24" res?

The unpatched Assassin's creed test wasn't a surprise, but yea - I found that a little inconsistant.


http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3338&p=7 anand's review shows this~

 

[L1qu1d]

From what I see, the 4850 exchanges results with the 3870 X2 just like the GX2 exchanges with the 280 GTX.

At High resolution the 4850 has the Advantage because of the ram

The thing I hate about Nvidia is the 280 GTX has 1 gig but their 260 has 800 or so....my god are they really that cheap? geez....

Ati approached the situation very clever by making both cards 1 gig and attracting the mainstream users with the RAm

 

[ovaltineplease]

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_radeon_hd_4850_geforce_9800_gtx+/page9.asp

4850HD vs 9800GTX+

these results look more realistic

Bleh, I hate to say this but I am kinda with a few other people and I really thing the performance of the 4850 single might be getting bloated by some of the reviewers taking selective benches as the norm

I think the 4850 outperforming the 9800GTX vanilla is pretty normal, but the 4850 coming within a hair of the gtx260 looks pretty shady to me lol

 

[L1qu1d]

^ yeah ill have to be skeptical as well. I mean every1 saw the GX2 results before launch and the 280 GTX scores not really to par


EDIT: I just saw that, the charts have a 9800 GTX+???? :|

 

[ovaltineplease]

yea, looks pretty good so far

I don't think i'd buy the 9800GTX+ myself, but i bet it overclocks like a dandy

 

[marvelous211]

Every website have a different way of benchmarking. One might use a timedemo and other might use fraps. Even when using fraps 1 might be using different map or area of map, drivers, test setup, etc,... There are many variables to benchmarking. What I do know that 4850 is slightly ahead of 9800gtx especially with AA.

Anandtech is showing same kind of results where 4850 is substantially faster @ 1600x1200 compared to 9800gtx. I trust anandtech and techreport over Firingsquad. Firingsquad just benches or game reviews. They never ever do anything technically inclined.

 

[L1qu1d]

well Ill have to trust you because of your bomb review ont he 8800 GS haha

 

[Maziar]

HD 4850 = Better performance (Not much) than a 9800GTX in almost all games with a lower price

 

[johnnyxp64]

i cant belive the temp is the highest from all...in guru3d.com they say oposite what tha frack with those reviews, who can we trust ???????

and what the frack is going on with this topic and allways keeps farwarding at egg.com???

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Well still not enough technical details out there, but the one thing I did take away from this review was the power and heat figures, not as it relates to the desktop space (it's a single slot cooler against a bunch of dual slots) but as a notebook part there's little chance cooling would be anywhere near that good, and a higher idle power useage than the HD3870, GTX260/280 means a lot of idle power usage and pretty much a requirement no option of CrossfireX hybrid power.

I was hoping for an HD4850 style GPU in the HP HDX by the fall, but unless they get a sweet mature silicon helper, this looks still a little warm and power hungry for a straight mobile part swap, unlike was initially rumoured (which would mean quick introduction into laptops).

Oh well, hopefully they get something close to similar by September.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

i cant belive the temp is the highest from all...in guru3d.com they say oposite what tha frack with those reviews, who can we trust ???????

Well funny you wre writing that at the same time I was writing my post.

The reason is due to the single slot HSF assembly while the others have a much more robust cooling solution. Put something the size of the other coolers on the HD4850 and the numbers would be much lower. The HD4850 is the only small single slot cooler.

The only reason it concerns me is that you really can get better that that level in a laptop.

 

[mactronix]

I am also very dissapointed that there are no detailed archetecture reviews of the card yet, I was looking forward to seeing them foro some time now, ever since they were anounced in fact.
Are we really going to have to wait for the 4870 cards to come out first ? Also i have to agree that the power and cooling levels are not what i was hoping for but maybe that will be addressed by differant partner boards?
HIS always seem to put the dual slot ICEQ cooler on a version. Does anyone know how much room the differant companies have been given with these cards ? Could we get a superclocked version with GDDR5 memory if one of the manufacturers decided it was worth it ?
Mactronix

 

[ovaltineplease]

a few people have said that replacing the thermal paste with higher quality thermal paste has brought down their temperatures a lot.

don't know if thats accurate, but its been mentioned; not that high tech of a thing to do if someone wanted to, but yea

 

[marvelous211]

I am also very dissapointed that there are no detailed archetecture reviews of the card yet, I was looking forward to seeing them foro some time now, ever since they were anounced in fact.
Are we really going to have to wait for the 4870 cards to come out first ? Also i have to agree that the power and cooling levels are not what i was hoping for but maybe that will be addressed by differant partner boards?
HIS always seem to put the dual slot ICEQ cooler on a version. Does anyone know how much room the differant companies have been given with these cards ? Could we get a superclocked version with GDDR5 memory if one of the manufacturers decided it was worth it ?
Mactronix

NDA hasn't fully lifted yet. I think the reviewers were told not to give detailed information about architecture.

Extremetech article got taken down rather quick when they had detailed info about what AMD did to it's architecture.

Basically no more 512 bit ring bus and have re-engineered it's memory bus to much more efficient and fixed their AA resolve. Re-designed it's SP and some other tweaks, added 24 more TMU.

One interesting about 4850 is that it's FP16 Blending fillrate is neck and neck with 280gtx. This would be the biggest improvement far as their texture fillrate goes. But bililear fillrate tests show it's lower than 9800gtx. But if you remember 8800gtx or the ultra it's texture fillrate was lower than 9800gtx but easily matching 9800gtx performance because it had same amount of FP16 Blending fillrate. Of course 8800gtx has a little more ROP and a little more bandwidth but raw performance was very close either way.


FP 16 Blending

This is 8 bit integer texture

 

[Maziar]

In higher resolutions, 8800GTX manage to beat the 9800GTX due to its 384bit and 768MB of memory