Introduction
The HD4850 series recently released by AMD quickly got its name for having the best price to performance ratio in the market. Its no wonder that this card should gain immediate attention as it matches and betters the previous high end performance card 9800GTX from nVidia and at a $200 price point. This chip pretty much crushes every game released till now accept maybe for Crysis and two of these in Crossfire match and sometimes out perform even the best and costliest single GPU high end card, the nVidia GeForce GTX280
There are many flavors of the AMD reference cards re-branded, floating in the market. Today we will take a peek at the HD4850 bundle from Asus, the Asus EAH4850.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Technical Specifications
Interface - PCI Express 2.0 x16
GPU - Radeon HD 4850
Core clock - 625MHz
Stream Processors - 800
Memory Clock -1986MHz
Memory Size - 512MB
Memory Interface - 256-bit
Memory Type - GDDR3
DirectX - DirectX 10.1
OpenGL - OpenGL 2.0
RAMDAC - 400 MHz
Max Resolution - 2560 x 1600
CrossFire Supported - Yes
Cooler - Single Slot Heat sink With Fan
Power Connector - 6 Pin
Dual-Link DVI Supported - Yes
GPU Features
ATI® Radeon® HD 4850
PCI Express & PCI Express 2.0 support
HDMI 1.3 Output: built-in multi-channel 7.1 surround audio over DVI-HDMI Adaptor
ATI CrossFireXâ„¢: plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX technology with up to quad-GPU support.
Microsoft DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support
OpenGL®2.1 support
HDCP compliant
I/O Specifications
PCI-Express 2.0
HDTV-out
DVI * 2
D-Sub
HDMI
HDCP compliant
ASUS Features
ASUS Splendid:
Watching movies on PC is as good as on Top-of-the-line consumer television
ASUS Gamer OSD:
Real-time overclocking, benchmarking and video capturing in any PC game!
ASUS Video Security Online:
Keep an eye on your home at all times no matter where you are
ASUS Smart Doctor:
Your intelligent hardware protection and overclocking tool.
[BREAK=The Bundle - 1]
Lets take a look at the bundle first.
The Package
Asus has always been very particular about the packaging for its products and Asus EAH4850 is no different. The box is huge to the point that it makes you mistake it for a motherboard. There is a cool graphic of a cute elven archer girl on top.
There is also a box announcing that a HDMI Dongle is bundled free of cost. Frankly, I don't know why they did it since almost very flavor of the card bundled the HDMI dongle.
The quality of the box itself is pretty good.
Package Backside
As usual, Information on the specs of the card, bundled software and special features fill up the backside of the box.
Opening...
Oh.. Whats this?? The box does not open from the top as it seemed. The top flap contains more information about the features of the card and the bundled software.
Here it goes, the box opens form the side and inside you will find another box.
The Black Box
As previously mentioned, you will find another box inside. As is expected from Asus, this is again no cheap looking box. The box has an Asus Logo in golden color. It looks as if its a box for some very costly jewelery or gadget.
[BREAK=The Bundle - 2]
The Card
This card is the AMD reference one. There is no deviation except for the graphic on the single slot cooler. The cute elven archer girl is present on the card too. The card looks cooler than most other branded cards which are again the same AMD reference cards, but with some bland graphic on the cooler.
Another difference is that plastic caps are included for all the ports and the crossfire connectors too.
Accessories
The following accessories are bundled with the card.
DVI to VGA/D-sub Adapter
DVI to HDMI Adapter
CrossFire Bridge
S-Video to Composite Adapter
S-Video to Component cable.
Molex to 6-Pin Power cable.
VGA Driver Disk
Asus Software Disk
[BREAK=Benchmarks - Bundled Software]
Asus Smart Doctor
One of the major disappointments cited about the HD48xx series cards is the extremely high operating temperatures of the card with even the idle temperatures more than 70 degrees. This is due the fact that AMD put programmed the BIOS for these cards run the fan at very low speeds.
Though AMD says that these operating temperatures are fine, the consumers, and especially the enthusiast segment is not satisfied. High operating temperatures automatically means lower overclock potential.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that none of the third party software which allowed fan speed control like Riva Runer, ATi Tray Tools etc supports these cards currently. Users eventually came up with a solution which involved creating a ATi Catalyst profile and modifying the saved XML file for the profile and then loading the profile every time windows is booted.
Asus on the other hand decided to provide fan speed control out of the box for its customers. This can be done through the included Asus Smart Doctor software.
Smart Doctor provides several features for tweaking the Graphics Card, but the most relevant ones for the buyers of 48xx series cards are the Fan Control and overclocking facilities.
In fact Asus has the credit of being the first to provide fan speed control for the HD48xx series through its software. Since the software was coded to run only on Asus cards, people who bought different flavors of the HD48xx series flashed their cards with a hacked Asus BIOS so that they can run Smart Doctor. A majority of the HD4870 card failures after launch were attributed to the cards getting bricked when the BIOS flash was not done properly.
Asus Gamer OSD
Asus Gamer OSD is another neat little tool that Asus provided. This software allows the user to make a video recording, take screen shots or even broadcast in-game footage.
[BREAK=Benchmarks - Test Machine Specs]
Test Machine Specifications
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3204 MHz (356 x 9)
Moterboard: Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 Motherboard
Memory: 4GB Cellshock DDR2 RAM @ 712MHz, 4-4-4-15
Hard Disk: Western Digital 640GB SATA 2 HDD
Graphics Card(s): 2 x Asus EAH4850 - Radeon HD4850 Graphics card.
Sound: Onboard Realtek HD Audio
Power Supply: Corsair HX1000 (1000W) PSU
Operating System: Windows XP SP3.
[BREAK=Benchmarks - 3DMark 06]
3DMark 06 - Single Card
Score: 12234
3DMark 06 - Crossfire
Score: 14931
The score is limited pretty much by the CPU. Another thing I noticed is that the scores are very sensitive to the RAM timings and clocks too. A change in timings from 5-5-5-18 to 4-4-4-15 without change in any other setting yielded a score difference of about 800.
[BREAK=Benchmarks - 3DMark 05]
3DMark 05 - Single Card
Score: 17395
3DMark 05 - Crossfire
Score: 19465
[BREAK=Benchmarks - 3DMark 03]
3DMark 03 - Single Card
Score: 40540
3DMark 03 - Crossfire
Score: 59939
[BREAK=Benchmarks - DMC4 Benchmark]
DMC4 Benchmark - Single Card
SCENE1: 95.98 FPS
SCENE2: 67.37 FPS
SCENE3: 111.57 FPS
SCENE4: 72.24 FPS
DMC4 Benchmark - Crossfire
SCENE1: 184.80 FPS
SCENE2: 129.47 FPS
SCENE3: 225.11 FPS
SCENE4: 133.97 FPS
[BREAK=Benchmarks - To be continued...]
To be continued...
The HD4850 series recently released by AMD quickly got its name for having the best price to performance ratio in the market. Its no wonder that this card should gain immediate attention as it matches and betters the previous high end performance card 9800GTX from nVidia and at a $200 price point. This chip pretty much crushes every game released till now accept maybe for Crysis and two of these in Crossfire match and sometimes out perform even the best and costliest single GPU high end card, the nVidia GeForce GTX280
There are many flavors of the AMD reference cards re-branded, floating in the market. Today we will take a peek at the HD4850 bundle from Asus, the Asus EAH4850.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Technical Specifications
Interface - PCI Express 2.0 x16
GPU - Radeon HD 4850
Core clock - 625MHz
Stream Processors - 800
Memory Clock -1986MHz
Memory Size - 512MB
Memory Interface - 256-bit
Memory Type - GDDR3
DirectX - DirectX 10.1
OpenGL - OpenGL 2.0
RAMDAC - 400 MHz
Max Resolution - 2560 x 1600
CrossFire Supported - Yes
Cooler - Single Slot Heat sink With Fan
Power Connector - 6 Pin
Dual-Link DVI Supported - Yes
GPU Features
ATI® Radeon® HD 4850
PCI Express & PCI Express 2.0 support
HDMI 1.3 Output: built-in multi-channel 7.1 surround audio over DVI-HDMI Adaptor
ATI CrossFireXâ„¢: plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX technology with up to quad-GPU support.
Microsoft DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support
OpenGL®2.1 support
HDCP compliant
I/O Specifications
PCI-Express 2.0
HDTV-out
DVI * 2
D-Sub
HDMI
HDCP compliant
ASUS Features
ASUS Splendid:
Watching movies on PC is as good as on Top-of-the-line consumer television
ASUS Gamer OSD:
Real-time overclocking, benchmarking and video capturing in any PC game!
ASUS Video Security Online:
Keep an eye on your home at all times no matter where you are
ASUS Smart Doctor:
Your intelligent hardware protection and overclocking tool.
[BREAK=The Bundle - 1]
Lets take a look at the bundle first.
The Package
Asus has always been very particular about the packaging for its products and Asus EAH4850 is no different. The box is huge to the point that it makes you mistake it for a motherboard. There is a cool graphic of a cute elven archer girl on top.
There is also a box announcing that a HDMI Dongle is bundled free of cost. Frankly, I don't know why they did it since almost very flavor of the card bundled the HDMI dongle.
The quality of the box itself is pretty good.
Package Backside
As usual, Information on the specs of the card, bundled software and special features fill up the backside of the box.
Opening...
Oh.. Whats this?? The box does not open from the top as it seemed. The top flap contains more information about the features of the card and the bundled software.
Here it goes, the box opens form the side and inside you will find another box.
The Black Box
As previously mentioned, you will find another box inside. As is expected from Asus, this is again no cheap looking box. The box has an Asus Logo in golden color. It looks as if its a box for some very costly jewelery or gadget.
[BREAK=The Bundle - 2]
The Card
This card is the AMD reference one. There is no deviation except for the graphic on the single slot cooler. The cute elven archer girl is present on the card too. The card looks cooler than most other branded cards which are again the same AMD reference cards, but with some bland graphic on the cooler.
Another difference is that plastic caps are included for all the ports and the crossfire connectors too.
Accessories
The following accessories are bundled with the card.
DVI to VGA/D-sub Adapter
DVI to HDMI Adapter
CrossFire Bridge
S-Video to Composite Adapter
S-Video to Component cable.
Molex to 6-Pin Power cable.
VGA Driver Disk
Asus Software Disk
[BREAK=Benchmarks - Bundled Software]
Asus Smart Doctor
One of the major disappointments cited about the HD48xx series cards is the extremely high operating temperatures of the card with even the idle temperatures more than 70 degrees. This is due the fact that AMD put programmed the BIOS for these cards run the fan at very low speeds.
Though AMD says that these operating temperatures are fine, the consumers, and especially the enthusiast segment is not satisfied. High operating temperatures automatically means lower overclock potential.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that none of the third party software which allowed fan speed control like Riva Runer, ATi Tray Tools etc supports these cards currently. Users eventually came up with a solution which involved creating a ATi Catalyst profile and modifying the saved XML file for the profile and then loading the profile every time windows is booted.
Asus on the other hand decided to provide fan speed control out of the box for its customers. This can be done through the included Asus Smart Doctor software.
Smart Doctor provides several features for tweaking the Graphics Card, but the most relevant ones for the buyers of 48xx series cards are the Fan Control and overclocking facilities.
In fact Asus has the credit of being the first to provide fan speed control for the HD48xx series through its software. Since the software was coded to run only on Asus cards, people who bought different flavors of the HD48xx series flashed their cards with a hacked Asus BIOS so that they can run Smart Doctor. A majority of the HD4870 card failures after launch were attributed to the cards getting bricked when the BIOS flash was not done properly.
Asus Gamer OSD
Asus Gamer OSD is another neat little tool that Asus provided. This software allows the user to make a video recording, take screen shots or even broadcast in-game footage.
[BREAK=Benchmarks - Test Machine Specs]
Test Machine Specifications
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3204 MHz (356 x 9)
Moterboard: Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 Motherboard
Memory: 4GB Cellshock DDR2 RAM @ 712MHz, 4-4-4-15
Hard Disk: Western Digital 640GB SATA 2 HDD
Graphics Card(s): 2 x Asus EAH4850 - Radeon HD4850 Graphics card.
Sound: Onboard Realtek HD Audio
Power Supply: Corsair HX1000 (1000W) PSU
Operating System: Windows XP SP3.
[BREAK=Benchmarks - 3DMark 06]
3DMark 06 - Single Card
Score: 12234
3DMark 06 - Crossfire
Score: 14931
The score is limited pretty much by the CPU. Another thing I noticed is that the scores are very sensitive to the RAM timings and clocks too. A change in timings from 5-5-5-18 to 4-4-4-15 without change in any other setting yielded a score difference of about 800.
[BREAK=Benchmarks - 3DMark 05]
3DMark 05 - Single Card
Score: 17395
3DMark 05 - Crossfire
Score: 19465
[BREAK=Benchmarks - 3DMark 03]
3DMark 03 - Single Card
Score: 40540
3DMark 03 - Crossfire
Score: 59939
[BREAK=Benchmarks - DMC4 Benchmark]
DMC4 Benchmark - Single Card
SCENE1: 95.98 FPS
SCENE2: 67.37 FPS
SCENE3: 111.57 FPS
SCENE4: 72.24 FPS
DMC4 Benchmark - Crossfire
SCENE1: 184.80 FPS
SCENE2: 129.47 FPS
SCENE3: 225.11 FPS
SCENE4: 133.97 FPS
[BREAK=Benchmarks - To be continued...]
To be continued...
