Any benchmarks on Sapphire's 4860?

blackjellognomes

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Feb 17, 2009
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Hi guys,

I've been looking to buy a budget gpu for a while now and a while back I came across Sapphire's 4860. At the time I hadn't thought much of it, because many were saying that it was just a crippled 4770.

Recently I've been doing a bit more research on it and apparently it was originally meant to be restricted to parts of Asia. Not sure why it's on Newegg. Anyway, it's actually a cut-down 4890, much like the 4850 is a cut-down 4870 (Sorry if this is old news to some of you), and based on the RV790 architecture. Which implies some serious overclocking potential.

After a bit of googling, I found that some people had OC'ed their 4860's to roughly 910 core / 975 mem using MSI's Afterburner. Not too surprising if you consider its 2x6 power connectors and massive heatsink. BUT that's clocked higher than a stock 4890. :pt1cable:
Even though it's limited by it's 640 SPUs, I think it's performance should rival that of the 4890. Which makes my previous choice, the 5770, look rather overpriced, seeing as this card costs $130. Yes, I know, it doesn't support DX11 or Eyefinity, nor is it based on particularly efficient architecture, but those factors don't appear to justify the price difference or performance difference for me ATM. By the time DX11 games are mainstream, the 5770 will be a relatively low-end card with poor overclocking abilities. I don't mean to bash the 5770, but I think buying this card now and another upgrade in ~3 years would be more practical for a budget gamer like myself (If you're rolling in cash, you probably won't understand where I'm coming from. Enjoy your 5870/295 and forget about this post).

Some links:
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=334555
http://www.overclock.net/ati/648665-sapphire-hd-4860-overclock.html

So to the point, this card looks like a steal. It's just that there aren't many reviews on it considering it's been out a few months, and I'm still somewhat skeptical. :lol:
Anyone have benchmarks on it? I'd like to see benchies of it OC'ed of course. Thoughts on this would be appreciated too.
 

youssef 2010

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Jan 1, 2009
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This is clearly not an official AMD model (might be recongnized throught the catalyst).I might be mistaken but I think this is a special mod from sapphire.Anyway,the Extra Bandwidhth and memory speed could come in handy in quite some games.Also, I think its very reasonably priced, because the cheapest 1 GB GDDR3 4850 costs $109.99(before shipping).This card is about $ 10 more & for that you get 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5 so,where is the steal here????

BTW,It's not a crippled 4770 as it has 256-memory bus VS. the 4770's 128-bit memory bus so,If the overclocked numbers you have is correct, it should almost match the performance of a 4870 (or surpass it by a little bit once overclocked) but it no longer has the 4770's narrow 128-bit bus (which could be a bottle neck at higher resolutions).But it clearly has the4890's main advantage,which is insane overclocking headroom.(it's only natural that it's able to clock higher becase of the reduced heat and power consumption comppared to the 4890)

Cheapest 4850 I can find (1GB not 512 MB): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131163&cm_re=4850-_-14-131-163-_-Product
Sapphire HD 4860 (only one I could find): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102866&Tpk=4860