Well the highly anticipated HD 4850 is finally available locally in India.
The card in limelight today is the PALIT HD 4850 512MB. The price is around 11500 all incl.
Lets have a look at the card box and its bundle first:
It comes with a Composite cable, Molex to PCI-E power connector, Crossfire connector, DVI-HDMI connector, DVI-DSub Connector and driver cd. Surprisingly no games , not even the ruby demo cd was bundled. Cost cutting at its best but who cares
So since we had a look into the box and the bundle, now lets turn our attention to the card.
As like all initial launch, this is also a fully reference card from ATI , with only a Palit sticker to differentiate from other manufacturers.
[BREAK=Page 2---Looks and Build Quality]
Coming to the build quality of the card , its quite good for a mid range card and is quite similar to the older generation HD 3850.
Some changes which is notable is the side vents on the plastic shroud so that air ventilation/escape routes are better. The fan used is quite an high speed one and can sound worse then even a hair drier even at 80% :O. Of course the fan is PWM controlled so nothing to worry about much as you can control the speed as needed. The full heatsink including the VRM part seems to be of anodized Aluminum with a copper color job and hence the heat dissipation should be ok even though it is not a very heavy duty one.
Now coming to the back side of the card, its looks quite complicated for a mid range card. In fact the chip controlling the vGPU is notable quite small than the one used in earlier generation and so can be a nightmare for volt modding enthusiasts. The memory voltage control chip on the contrary is quite simpler and easier to mod.
A closer shot
Enough ranting about the build of the card I guess . Lets move on now
[BREAK=Page 3---The Contestants]
Anyway here are the contestants for the review . The pic is enough for guessing
Ok the contestants are MSI 8800GT & eVGA 8800 Ultra
Here is the test system
Q6600 on IP35-E
2 X 1GB AxeRam
CM Realpower 550W
Windows XP 32-bit*
Catalyst 8.7 Beta for HD 4850
Nvidia Forceware 177.39 for 8800GT/8800Ultra
**For Crysis we used the modified "Very High" Cvars downloaded from guru3d which is comparable to "Very High" DX 10 setting in Vista
The MSI 8800GT is a stock oced card by arnd 10% on the core(660Mhz)
Of the games/benchmarks we tested, World in Conflict & 3D mark 06 are the only ones which are CPU limited. Hence they were tested at 3.6Ghz to get rid of any CPU bottlenecking.
[BREAK=Page 4---The Numbers Game(Fear & Grid)]
F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate
Well to speak of the nos above, the 8800Ulta and HD 4850 are quite close. Also notable is that the quite low min fps in case of HD 4850 may be because of a driver bug as its was hitching in a common position during our benching. Otherwise it ran smooth like silk. As of IQ , the 8800 Ultra and HD 4850 are quite similar in grading while the 8800GT seemed to be a bit ( mostly un-noticeable) lower.
GRID
The nos in this game was done using fraps by just starting the race and the car being kept in static conditions for 60 sec.
Here the HD 4850 is even faster than the Ultra :O, leaving the 8800GT far behind.
This is a game where you can play with all the eye candy enabled at 1680X1050 with a HD 4850 and still get good fps…and ya it looks just stunning. Speaking of IQ, somehow G92 based 8800GT was seriously lacking in some detail and seemed to be a bit blurred as well as washed out. The HD 4850 looked slightly better than the 8800Ultra though its mainly a personal preference and nothing one can notice easily.
[BREAK=Page 5---The Numbers Game(Crysis & WIC)]
CRYSIS**
So here in the big momma which bring all graphics powerhouses to their knees !
**For Crysis we used the modified "Very High" Cvars downloaded from guru3d which is comparable to "Very High" DX 10 setting in Vista
Well the 4850 comes within touching distance of the 8800Ultra and leaves the 8800GT behind by arnd 25%.The IQ is one thing which is finally noticeable in this game quite easily. G92 based 8800GT looked the worst of the three , while the HD 4850 easily topped out the Ultra in terms of better texture quality of the world detail
World In Conflict (WIC)
Next in line is World in Conflict , a really amazing looking game ïŠ
This game is highly limited by CPU power and hence we had to OC the Q6600 to 3.6Ghz to rule out the bottlenecks
The data for 8800GT was not available due to some issues. The 8800Ultra here rules with its raw bandwidth which is being heavily used in getting the huge map detail. The physics effect in this game is really good and this is where a fast CPU came into action, increasing the fps by almost as good as 40% (frm 2.4G to 3.6G in Q6600)
[BREAK=Page 6---The Numbers Game(3Dmark 06 )]
Finally some 3D mark 06 nos. Its quite useless if you ask me though
So this is it about all the nos
What we found interesting was that only WIC was CPU dependent, games like Crysis, Grid & Fear were totally limited by GPU and had little or almost no effect when we moved from 2.4Ghz to 3.6Ghz on the Q6600.
About the Image Quality on the whole ,we can comment that the HD 4850 edges out the 8800Ultra but only slightly due to some noticiable diff in IQ in Crysis & Grid.
[BREAK=Page 7---Temperatures & FanFix]
As everybody might be aware that with the stock HD 4850 , the temps are abysmally high if the fan fix is not applied in the profile. Its as high as 68-72 in idle, and 85-90 degrees on load. Once the fan profile is adjusted to around 40%-45% , the temps were around 55-58 idle and 70-75 at load. And ya at 45% the stock fan was quite silent
Enable Overdrive first in CCC(Catalyst Control Center)
Then go to ATI CCC and create a profile and save it.The ATI CC profiles are located here in Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\(Username)\Local Settings\Application Data\ATI\ACE
The part in bold is what was changed
After that activate the profile in CCC and you will get the manual fan speed activated. Anything above 50-55% sounds like a hair dryer and above 80% its like a jet getting ready to take off :rofl:
[BREAK=Page 8---Overclocking & SoftMod]
Overclocking can be done by enabling overdrive via CCC. I oced the Palit HD 4850 to 685/1100 Mhz and got a boost of 5-10% in the applications
Crysis @ 1680X1050 Very High 4xAA went from 17 fps to 18.82 fps (thats more than even the 8800Ultra)
Well there is an easy trick for the voltage boost as well. You have to edit the same xml profile as for the fan fix setting.Please note that the milleage might vary with this as stock voltages differ on every card. Please dont try soft modding as this might give out more heat and can result into an unstable card.
1123 is what is there by default. I increased it to 1158 to get some extra volts which helped the card to get to almost 700Mhz.
Another way is to use the latest Radeon Bios Editor v1.11 and edit out the bios and flash it using atiflash. Now that can be part of a guide for some other time or may be I will add to the review sometime later. The max voltage you can get via softmod is around 1.185 VGPU (load) from around 1.12VGPU(load)…its helps in gaining those last few juice out of your card.
The 2nd mod involves a BIOS flash and is not recommended as you might end up with a dead card if anything goes wrong. Please take back up of your stock bios before attempting this.
[BREAK=Page 9---Better Cooling Setup and some Nakid Chick pics]
Well I am talking about the Ruby and ya isn't she hot
Well as I was telling the temps were high even after the fanfix , so I thought of why not take out the stock HSF & check how is the stock goop(thermal paste) applied
So here are the pics of those
As you can see the stock goop is splattered all over the place and too much of it was used.
After some cleaning this is how it looked like....I didn't have rubbing alcohol/arctic clean in stock so had to use some ghetto method to clean it ..anyways
Finally I removed the stock HSF shroud as I had something in mind
[BREAK=Page 10---Better Cooling Setup Results]
So after removing the stock shroud, I mounted the original HSF out of coursing after curing the core with a puffy of AS5. Finally I put two 120mm fans directly on top of the card to direcytly blow on to the card. The results were astonishing. I could get the card upto 730/1150 Mhz, so this was just the heat which was pulling back the card. This is how it looks nw
Here are some results of Crysis & 3D Mark 06 at 730/1150
CRYSIS
3D Mark 06
[BREAK=Page 11---Accelero S1 Rev 2 Effect]
Finally got hold of the Accelero S1 from Amarbir, Lynx Chandigarh. Cheers
Here is a pic of the setup after installing it with a Amigo Tri-LED 120mm fan
Now with some more mods, HD 4850 was oced to a whooping 780 Mhz on the core and 1150Mhz on the memory (25% on the core, 15% on the memory)
Here are a few results at those clocks
And ya most importantly, the idle clock has gone down from 49 Degrees to 35-36 degrees. The load has gone down from 78-80 degrees(730/1150) to 52~55 degrees( 780/1150)
The Accelero S1 costs just arnd 1450+shipping. So its an amazing cooler for the price
Crysis
3D Mark 06
Some more nicer clocks achieved now
Finally 16k 3d Mark 06 on the HD 4850 without any 3D mark tweaks
[hwbot]16081 - Intel Q6600 @ 3.7GHz - Palit HD4850 @ 800/1200 - Asus P5Q-E - Transcend AxeRam @ 1154 Mhz 5-5-5-15 All Air[/hwbot]
And some hybrid CF nos with the HD 4870. Thanks to "Arya" for lending the bling bling tagan BZ 700 PSU
[hwbot]19220 - Intel Q6600 @ 3.6GHz - Sapphire HD 4870 + Palit HD4850 hybrid CF - Asus P5Q-E - Transcend AxeRam @ 800 Mhz 4-4-4-12 All Air[/hwbot]
[BREAK=Page 12---Conclusion]
So for a mid range card which costs a max of around 12k , this is quite a lot of performance. If you are a pro user , the card can be overclocked quite a lot using some easy modding available all over the internet.
Pros:
1. Amazing Performace at the pricepoint of 11k
2. UVD 2 Video Acceleration (VC1, H264, MPEG2)
3. AVIVO Converter (Accelerated Video Encoding)
4. 1 TeraFlops under the hood
5. Tessellation unit under hood for future proof gaming if ever developers take it up
6. HDMI 7.1 Audio Routing
Cons:
1. UVD/Powerplay broken in current driver(8.6 Hotfix).
2. HD 4870 if available at 16k will be a much better buy than this, considering price and performance ration
3. Stock Cooler not good enough for heavy duty overclocking.
4. Too average fan profile...needed to be more agressive
So if you have been looking for a worth upgrade for quite some time, this is a screaming buy. People having 8800GT/8800GTX can migrate to this , if they look at CF as a viable option. Actually under AA/AF this performs much better than both , so for high quality gaming and to be future proof this is much better.
TO end it up “DAAMIT is back for the GOODâ€
Keep your comments, as well as the bricks/bats flowing.
Ciao,
Supra
Team TechEnclave
PS :- This review was has been done with a lot of help from Chaos, Sandy and Lord Dagon who benchmarked the various cards at different settings .Also to Chaos for lending the 8800 Ultra. Cheers guys
Digg the Review here :
Digg - Who dugg or blogged: Palit HD 4850 pitted against 8800GT & 8800Ultra
The card in limelight today is the PALIT HD 4850 512MB. The price is around 11500 all incl.
Lets have a look at the card box and its bundle first:
It comes with a Composite cable, Molex to PCI-E power connector, Crossfire connector, DVI-HDMI connector, DVI-DSub Connector and driver cd. Surprisingly no games , not even the ruby demo cd was bundled. Cost cutting at its best but who cares
So since we had a look into the box and the bundle, now lets turn our attention to the card.
As like all initial launch, this is also a fully reference card from ATI , with only a Palit sticker to differentiate from other manufacturers.
[BREAK=Page 2---Looks and Build Quality]
Coming to the build quality of the card , its quite good for a mid range card and is quite similar to the older generation HD 3850.
Some changes which is notable is the side vents on the plastic shroud so that air ventilation/escape routes are better. The fan used is quite an high speed one and can sound worse then even a hair drier even at 80% :O. Of course the fan is PWM controlled so nothing to worry about much as you can control the speed as needed. The full heatsink including the VRM part seems to be of anodized Aluminum with a copper color job and hence the heat dissipation should be ok even though it is not a very heavy duty one.
Now coming to the back side of the card, its looks quite complicated for a mid range card. In fact the chip controlling the vGPU is notable quite small than the one used in earlier generation and so can be a nightmare for volt modding enthusiasts. The memory voltage control chip on the contrary is quite simpler and easier to mod.
A closer shot
Enough ranting about the build of the card I guess . Lets move on now
[BREAK=Page 3---The Contestants]
Anyway here are the contestants for the review . The pic is enough for guessing
Ok the contestants are MSI 8800GT & eVGA 8800 Ultra
Here is the test system
Q6600 on IP35-E
2 X 1GB AxeRam
CM Realpower 550W
Windows XP 32-bit*
Catalyst 8.7 Beta for HD 4850
Nvidia Forceware 177.39 for 8800GT/8800Ultra
**For Crysis we used the modified "Very High" Cvars downloaded from guru3d which is comparable to "Very High" DX 10 setting in Vista
The MSI 8800GT is a stock oced card by arnd 10% on the core(660Mhz)
Of the games/benchmarks we tested, World in Conflict & 3D mark 06 are the only ones which are CPU limited. Hence they were tested at 3.6Ghz to get rid of any CPU bottlenecking.
[BREAK=Page 4---The Numbers Game(Fear & Grid)]
F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate
Well to speak of the nos above, the 8800Ulta and HD 4850 are quite close. Also notable is that the quite low min fps in case of HD 4850 may be because of a driver bug as its was hitching in a common position during our benching. Otherwise it ran smooth like silk. As of IQ , the 8800 Ultra and HD 4850 are quite similar in grading while the 8800GT seemed to be a bit ( mostly un-noticeable) lower.
GRID
The nos in this game was done using fraps by just starting the race and the car being kept in static conditions for 60 sec.
Here the HD 4850 is even faster than the Ultra :O, leaving the 8800GT far behind.
This is a game where you can play with all the eye candy enabled at 1680X1050 with a HD 4850 and still get good fps…and ya it looks just stunning. Speaking of IQ, somehow G92 based 8800GT was seriously lacking in some detail and seemed to be a bit blurred as well as washed out. The HD 4850 looked slightly better than the 8800Ultra though its mainly a personal preference and nothing one can notice easily.
[BREAK=Page 5---The Numbers Game(Crysis & WIC)]
CRYSIS**
So here in the big momma which bring all graphics powerhouses to their knees !
**For Crysis we used the modified "Very High" Cvars downloaded from guru3d which is comparable to "Very High" DX 10 setting in Vista
Well the 4850 comes within touching distance of the 8800Ultra and leaves the 8800GT behind by arnd 25%.The IQ is one thing which is finally noticeable in this game quite easily. G92 based 8800GT looked the worst of the three , while the HD 4850 easily topped out the Ultra in terms of better texture quality of the world detail
World In Conflict (WIC)
Next in line is World in Conflict , a really amazing looking game ïŠ
This game is highly limited by CPU power and hence we had to OC the Q6600 to 3.6Ghz to rule out the bottlenecks
The data for 8800GT was not available due to some issues. The 8800Ultra here rules with its raw bandwidth which is being heavily used in getting the huge map detail. The physics effect in this game is really good and this is where a fast CPU came into action, increasing the fps by almost as good as 40% (frm 2.4G to 3.6G in Q6600)
[BREAK=Page 6---The Numbers Game(3Dmark 06 )]
Finally some 3D mark 06 nos. Its quite useless if you ask me though
So this is it about all the nos
What we found interesting was that only WIC was CPU dependent, games like Crysis, Grid & Fear were totally limited by GPU and had little or almost no effect when we moved from 2.4Ghz to 3.6Ghz on the Q6600.
About the Image Quality on the whole ,we can comment that the HD 4850 edges out the 8800Ultra but only slightly due to some noticiable diff in IQ in Crysis & Grid.
[BREAK=Page 7---Temperatures & FanFix]
As everybody might be aware that with the stock HD 4850 , the temps are abysmally high if the fan fix is not applied in the profile. Its as high as 68-72 in idle, and 85-90 degrees on load. Once the fan profile is adjusted to around 40%-45% , the temps were around 55-58 idle and 70-75 at load. And ya at 45% the stock fan was quite silent
Enable Overdrive first in CCC(Catalyst Control Center)
Then go to ATI CCC and create a profile and save it.The ATI CC profiles are located here in Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\(Username)\Local Settings\Application Data\ATI\ACE
The part in bold is what was changed
After that activate the profile in CCC and you will get the manual fan speed activated. Anything above 50-55% sounds like a hair dryer and above 80% its like a jet getting ready to take off :rofl:
[BREAK=Page 8---Overclocking & SoftMod]
Overclocking can be done by enabling overdrive via CCC. I oced the Palit HD 4850 to 685/1100 Mhz and got a boost of 5-10% in the applications
Crysis @ 1680X1050 Very High 4xAA went from 17 fps to 18.82 fps (thats more than even the 8800Ultra)
Well there is an easy trick for the voltage boost as well. You have to edit the same xml profile as for the fan fix setting.Please note that the milleage might vary with this as stock voltages differ on every card. Please dont try soft modding as this might give out more heat and can result into an unstable card.
1123 is what is there by default. I increased it to 1158 to get some extra volts which helped the card to get to almost 700Mhz.
Another way is to use the latest Radeon Bios Editor v1.11 and edit out the bios and flash it using atiflash. Now that can be part of a guide for some other time or may be I will add to the review sometime later. The max voltage you can get via softmod is around 1.185 VGPU (load) from around 1.12VGPU(load)…its helps in gaining those last few juice out of your card.
The 2nd mod involves a BIOS flash and is not recommended as you might end up with a dead card if anything goes wrong. Please take back up of your stock bios before attempting this.
[BREAK=Page 9---Better Cooling Setup and some Nakid Chick pics
]Well I am talking about the Ruby and ya isn't she hot
Well as I was telling the temps were high even after the fanfix , so I thought of why not take out the stock HSF & check how is the stock goop(thermal paste) applied
So here are the pics of those
As you can see the stock goop is splattered all over the place and too much of it was used.
After some cleaning this is how it looked like....I didn't have rubbing alcohol/arctic clean in stock so had to use some ghetto method to clean it ..anyways
Finally I removed the stock HSF shroud as I had something in mind
[BREAK=Page 10---Better Cooling Setup Results]
So after removing the stock shroud, I mounted the original HSF out of coursing after curing the core with a puffy of AS5. Finally I put two 120mm fans directly on top of the card to direcytly blow on to the card. The results were astonishing. I could get the card upto 730/1150 Mhz, so this was just the heat which was pulling back the card
. This is how it looks nw
Here are some results of Crysis & 3D Mark 06 at 730/1150
CRYSIS
3D Mark 06
[BREAK=Page 11---Accelero S1 Rev 2 Effect]
Finally got hold of the Accelero S1 from Amarbir, Lynx Chandigarh. Cheers
Here is a pic of the setup after installing it with a Amigo Tri-LED 120mm fan
Now with some more mods
, HD 4850 was oced to a whooping 780 Mhz on the core and 1150Mhz on the memory (25% on the core, 15% on the memory)Here are a few results at those clocks
And ya most importantly, the idle clock has gone down from 49 Degrees to 35-36 degrees. The load has gone down from 78-80 degrees(730/1150) to 52~55 degrees( 780/1150)
The Accelero S1 costs just arnd 1450+shipping. So its an amazing cooler for the price
Crysis
3D Mark 06
Some more nicer clocks achieved now
Finally 16k 3d Mark 06 on the HD 4850
without any 3D mark tweaks[hwbot]16081 - Intel Q6600 @ 3.7GHz - Palit HD4850 @ 800/1200 - Asus P5Q-E - Transcend AxeRam @ 1154 Mhz 5-5-5-15 All Air[/hwbot]
And some hybrid CF nos with the HD 4870. Thanks to "Arya" for lending the bling bling tagan BZ 700 PSU
[hwbot]19220 - Intel Q6600 @ 3.6GHz - Sapphire HD 4870 + Palit HD4850 hybrid CF - Asus P5Q-E - Transcend AxeRam @ 800 Mhz 4-4-4-12 All Air[/hwbot]
[BREAK=Page 12---Conclusion]
So for a mid range card which costs a max of around 12k , this is quite a lot of performance. If you are a pro user , the card can be overclocked quite a lot using some easy modding available all over the internet.
Pros:
1. Amazing Performace at the pricepoint of 11k
2. UVD 2 Video Acceleration (VC1, H264, MPEG2)
3. AVIVO Converter (Accelerated Video Encoding)
4. 1 TeraFlops under the hood
5. Tessellation unit under hood for future proof gaming if ever developers take it up
6. HDMI 7.1 Audio Routing
Cons:
1. UVD/Powerplay broken in current driver(8.6 Hotfix).
2. HD 4870 if available at 16k will be a much better buy than this, considering price and performance ration
3. Stock Cooler not good enough for heavy duty overclocking.
4. Too average fan profile...needed to be more agressive
So if you have been looking for a worth upgrade for quite some time, this is a screaming buy. People having 8800GT/8800GTX can migrate to this , if they look at CF as a viable option. Actually under AA/AF this performs much better than both , so for high quality gaming and to be future proof this is much better.
TO end it up “DAAMIT is back for the GOODâ€
Keep your comments, as well as the bricks/bats flowing.
Ciao,
Supra
Team TechEnclave
PS :- This review was has been done with a lot of help from Chaos, Sandy and Lord Dagon who benchmarked the various cards at different settings .Also to Chaos for lending the 8800 Ultra. Cheers guys
Digg the Review here :
Digg - Who dugg or blogged: Palit HD 4850 pitted against 8800GT & 8800Ultra
