Asus HD4850 512mb PCI-E Graphics Card EAH4850

 

A common mistake made when benchmarking graphics cards is that the rest of the PC system isn’t sufficient enough to test the GPU to its limits. This results in a bottleneck situation, where the system can only run at the speed of its slowest component. For this reason, the test configuration chosen below has been specially selected to give each of the graphics cards on test the headroom they require in order to produce the best results.

 

 

A selection of games and benchmark suites has also been chosen to test each of the cards with several game engines. Each of the cards will be run at both low and high resolutions with varying levels of texture filtering to represent the use of the card with both small and large screen sizes.

 

 

With the new architecture, we really wanted to grab a 9800GTX to compare straight to the HD4850, so we added this to a nice list of other cards to help you see what its performance is like compared. Interestingly, it is supposed to go up against the 8800 GT’s of this world, but really a 9800 GTX is clo…….OK we’ll leave that bit until later 🙂

 

A recent feature to enter the Overclock3D GPU review system is the “Cost per FPS” scale. This scale gives a rough indication of which card offers the best bang per buck based on the price of each card at the time of this review. Looking in some e-tailors, we found that the Asus HD4850 was listed at a pretty sweet £141 @ SCAN, so we can see how this adds up below:

 

 

 

Using only the  the ATI Overdrive™ facility built into the driver control panel, the maximum overclock we were able to obtain from the HD4850 was 750mhz on the core and 1120mhz on the memory. Going any higher than this caused random system freezes, overheating and visual corruption issues during testing. Benchmarking at the overclocked speeds produced the following results in 3DMark Vantage:

 

 

The overclock was most certainly worthwhile, with the “Extreme” 1900×1200 results in Vantage shooting up by over 500 points and the “Performance” score by an even more impressive 1268 points. Now let’s move onto the rest of the benchmark results…