On our test system, the Radeon HD 4850 in CrossFire mode only gains a bit of performance on average compared to the HD 4870 at 1680x1050 pixels with anti-aliasing turned on. This benefit of up to 5% in performance isn’t actually worthwhile at current prices and taking energy consumption into consideration. A pair of Radeon HD 4850s would cost $360, while the single HD 4870 can be purchased for $270.
You should also take a good look at the results for the individual games, though. With anti-aliasing, the HD 4850 in CrossFire is faster at many resolutions. For example, Mass Effect running at 1920x1200 with 4xAA achieves 38.6 fps with the HD 4870, but hits 50.2 fps with the HD 4850 CrossFire. World in Conflict at 1920x1200 with 4xAA runs at 34.8 fps on the HD 4870, but 44.5 fps with the HD 4850 in CrossFire.
In 2D mode, the power consumption of the entire system increases to 177 watts. Under full 3D load, it is 367 watts, which is 79 watts more than an individual HD 4870 requires. Anyone who wishes to operate AMD’s Radeon HD 4870 in CrossFire mode will need a solid power supply with between 300 and 340 watts and 25 to 28 A on the 12 volt rail for a standard system.
In 2D mode, the paired cards are nice and quiet at just 36.3 dB(A). Only when under full load does the noise increase to a significantly louder 46 dB(A), which is also achieved by a single HD 4870. The temperatures are two degrees higher in 2D mode (for CrossFire) versus a single card. You need to remember though, that from now on you have two substantial heat sources tucked away in your PC case. Even with very good ventilation, the temperature of the remaining components should be checked frequently.
- Taxing Modern CPUs With Powerful Graphics
- Comparing The GPUs And Test Setup
- Radeon HD 4850
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4850
- Radeon HD 4870 OC
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4870 OC
- GeForce GTX 260 OC
- SLI With GeForce GTX 260 OC
- GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- SLI With GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- Assassin’s Creed v1.02
- Call of Duty 4 v1.6
- Crysis v1.21 High Quality
- Crysis v1.21 Very High Quality
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.4
- Half Life 2: Episode 2
- Mass Effect
- Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2
- World in Conflict v1.05
- 3DMark06 1280x1024 v1.1.0
- How Overclocking Affected The MSI Cards
- Overall Performance
- Price/Performance Comparison
- How About Graphics Image Quality?
- Power Consumption, Noise, And Temperature
- Frames-Per-Watt For The GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series At 1280x1024
- GTX 200-Series and HD 4800-Series At 1680x1050
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series at 1920x1200
- All Cards Compared At 1280x1024
- All Cards Compared At 1680x1050
- All Cards Compared At 1920x1200
- Is The Upgrade Worthwhile?
- Swapping Old Chips For New
- Evaluation Of The New Generation
- Conclusions – Radeon HD 4850 Is The Winner

My one complaint? Why use that CPU when you know that the test cards are going to max it out? Why not a quad core OC'ed to 4GHz? It'd give far more meaning to the SLI results. We don't want results that we can duplicate at home, we want results that show what these cards can do. Its a GPU card comparason, not a complain about not having a powerful enough CPU story.
Oh? And please get a native english speaker to give it the once over for spelling and grammar errors, although this one had far less then many articles posted lately.
Remember, the more you know.
but yes the article was off to a great start, maybe throw some vantage in there as well?
Precisely; several other websites tested with 8.7 and 8.8 long before this article was published. Why couldn't you? Look at the 8.6 release notes; it doesn't even mention the HD4000 series cards as supported devices.
Brilliant guys.
This is another reason why the results are tanked, in XP you get 15% more performance compared to these values
After having the Mythbusters appear, you would think this would be the most comprehensive, "scientific," factual, and update article meeting Tom's usual standards.... I didn't finish reading this.
(82 temperature in 2D 69 in 3D with no fanfix)
Also, I can understand why TH didn't have time to use 8.8 since it was released publicly on August 20, 2008 (Although ATI would have gladly released a beta version to TH for testing purposes).
However, AMD publicly released stable Catalyst 8.7(internal version 8.512) on July 21, 2008. That's more than a month ago. It has numerous improvements (for example, CF performance increase, improved stability and performance under Vista). To be honest, most of the improvements range from 4% to 15%. (In CF case, up to 1.7 X scaling)
TH has rarely been unfair and/or inaccurate and they always owned up to their mistakes before, and I trust them to re-test ATI products with at least 8.7 if not 8.8 to continue to uphold their values and integrity.
Now on to my criticism.
I can understand how you want to keep the results homogeneous with previous results but if you already know that a stock QX6800 will bottleneck the system, be proactive in fixing it. At the very least you should have done a small segment of the review showing the newer cards with a quad core overclocked to 4.0Ghz.
Also, if you have ever read any of the older Toms articles, you would know that you can still minimise the bottleneck from a slow GPU bye raising the resolution. Perhaps you should test the fastest cards at the highest resolutions?
I can also understand why you did not use the latest nVidia drivers. It takes time to create a review of this scale and the GF8/9 series drivers have been stable for some time. As the GT 200 series brings no new features to the table, they would needed little optimisation for their newer cards allowing the slightly dated drivers to perform nicely.
What I can not understand is why you would use ATI's 8.6 drivers??
The 8.7 drivers have been out for more than a month bringing quite a few fixes/optimisations with it. I understand it probably took more than 9 days to complete all of these benchmarks (today is the 29th, the 8.8 drivers were officially released on the 20th) but you should have called ATI and asked for their latest drivers. The 8.8 drivers were leaked at least a week before the official release which means, if you could nurture a relationship with the people you review, they could/probably would have provided them to you. There is still no excuse I can see for testing with the old 8.6 drivers. Seriously, it does not even have official support for the 48X0 cards...
From the title of the article,"The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head", I would have assumed that you would have been testing the Fastest 3D cards? What happened to your 4870x2? As you have already attempted to review it, we know you have your hands on one. How can you claim to review the "Fastest 3D Cards" and still leave out the fastest card?
In summation, I liked many things from this article. The layout was nice and a little more technical than we have been seeing as of late. I enjoyed the comparison charts at the end and I think you should adopt a similar method for the CPU and GPU charts. I would have thought this was an excellent and well thought out article if it had not been for the glaring and obvious deficiencies in reason. I give you credit for stepping Toms in the right direction. With a little more unbiased comparison, critical thinking and common sense I could come to see reviews such as this in a very positive light.