Installation/Operation

The 9.25" length of the Force3D HD4850 made installation and cable routing significantly easier than the 10.5" behemoths we've seen elsewhere.  ATi's website does not yet publicly offer a downloadable HD4800 driver as of yet.  As such we installed the included Force3D driver that came with the card.  Driver installation and getting the card set went without any difficulties.

The new trend in VGA cards is that they all seem to run hot.  The Catalyst Control Panel sensor gave us an idle GPU temperature reading of 75 degrees Celsius.  With that as an starting point I was a bit nervous about GPU load temps.  Surprisingly, no matter how long we fragged we never saw the temps cross 85 degrees Celsius.  Our handy IR Thermometer showed the copper cooling plate to be 154 degrees Fahrenheit (aka 68 Celsius).

  

Noise level

The Force3D Radeon HD4850's cooling fan is a variable rate unit that adjust based on GPU temperature.  Like the last few Radeons we have reviewed, the card remained tolerable under load.  It never got anywhere near the Dust Buster level we saw with the HD2900.

Performance

Our test bed is based around an ASUS Maximus Formula X38 based mainboard.  The OS is Windows Vista Home Premium installed in a RAID Stripe array (RAID 0) on two Western Digital SATA II HDDs.  Comparison cards today are going to be a Radeon HD3870x2 and a GeForce 8800GT.

Testing will be done with real world game play using frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program.  Results are graphed in three minute segments from three game titles, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and STALKER.  Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record game play from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products.  Screen resolution and other settings will be listed out before each performance graph.  Full screen anti aliasing will be set to 0x in our testing.  ATi's Catalyst 8.5 were used for the HD3870x2 while the included Force3D drivers were used for the HD4850.

Test Bed

• ASUS Maximus Formula mainboard

• Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4GHz) @ 3.0GHz

• ThermalRight Chill Factor Thermal Paste

• Kingwin RVT 12025 D Cooler

• (2) 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-6400 Memory (4-4-4-15) @ DDR2-867

• (2) 250MB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA II HDD in RAID 0 Array

• Generic 16x DVD-RW drive

• Tt ToughPower 1200w PSU

• Windows Vista 32 Home Premium with all service packs installed

• Open rack layout

 

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Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card
Pg. 3 - Installation/Noise/Test Bed
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks
Pg. 5 - Image Quality/Overclocking/Conclusion