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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