Conclusion
Despite this botched launch, where the Radeon HD 4850 was available even before the press had information about it and the 4870 is still not available, there’s no denying that the 4850 is a very good card. Its performance is only 19% below the GeForce 260 GTX’ and is overall on a par with the GeForce 9800 GTX +, while beating out the 3870 X2! Note that those figures are influenced by the slight factory overclocking of the Asus model tested for this article, but on the other hand they’re adversely affected by the absence of Race Driver: GRID due to the problems we had with our sample card.
Still, the 4850 is already available at a price even lower than expected: $200! Nvidia should be the first to be surprised by that, while their decision to send us a GeForce 9800 GTX + a month before its availability (thus causing a big drop in the GeForce 9800 GTX’ price with some stores are starting to offer it for $199 ), won’t be enough. The GeForce 9800 GTX +, though not uninteresting (since it uses Nvidia’s first 55 µm GPU, with a frequency increased by 9% and a slight drop in power consumption and temperature), only represents a slight improvement in performance compared to the 9800 GTX and it costs more (it’s expected to retail in the neighborhood of $230, with the 9800 GTX’ price dropping a little more in the meantime), and above all it’s not yet available. As of now, in any event, it doesn’t seem to be worth the additional wait, prior to publication of our results of the high-end Radeon HD 4870.
AMD Radeon HD 4850
A too-hasty launch, but a card with a red-hot performance/price ratio despite its use of a reworked architecture, now optimized and extremely effective at this price level. Despite its advance in presenting the GeForce 9800 GTX +, Nvidia has been bested for performance/price ratio and at this price level.
- Pros
- Cons
- Optimized and corrected RV670 architecturePerformance on a par or slightly better than the GeForce 9800 GTX +Antialiasing often performs better than GeForce
- Higher power use and temperature at idle
+ AWARD: The Tom’s Hardware Recommended Buy Award, given to a product that provides the best bang for the buck.
