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Force 3D Radeon HD4850 The final standard bench is Futuremark's latest benchmarking suite, 3D Mark Vantage for Vista based machines. While I'm not a huge fan of canned benches, a number of you have e-mailed asking that we include some of the Futuremark benchmarks.
Image Quality Below is a non-compressed screen shot from NFS: Pro Street and Unreal Tournament 3. Resolution was set to 1600 with eye candy set to max to include max FSAA for NFS and 1920 for UT3 with all settings tapped out. Visual quality becomes a subjective thing at this level. Rather than my tell you, see for yourself below. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Overclocking ATi reference design calls for 625MHz on the core and 1986MHz on the GDDR3 memory clock. Using the Catalyst Overdrive panel we played around until we found the stable ceiling of our test card. The 'auto-tune' overclocking button worked well but gave us frequencies higher than the card could truly handle for more than 15 minutes. So it was back to the hit and miss of finding the sweet spot we all love so much. We found a maximum overclock of 675MHa and 2240MHz on the core and memory respectively. Let's load Crysis back up to see what this does for our frame rates.
Conclusion The Radeon HD4850 is a refreshing breath of fresh air. Heaven knows ATi was due for one too. Force3D has come in at the right time with the right GPU to make a nice splash. A $200 card that goes head to head with some of the most powerful cards we've ever had in the shop. The Radeon HD4850 represents the best bang for the buck on the market today. Aside from raw gaming frames per second, you find nice image quality, Blu-Ray support, HDMI 7.1 audio and a card that is CrossFireX ready. It's the last that gives me goose bumps. Two of these $200 screamers would be something to see, something perhaps only surpassed by two HD4870s. Anyway you slice it, the HD4850 is a novel and worthwhile card. Force3D's manufacture leaves nothing to be desired. I expect them to come into the retail market with this card priced under the $200 competition just from the look at the bundle. It wasn't that they skimped but rather that you could see it was cost cutting because what you got was right. Our thanks go out to Force3D for sponsoring this review of a product that will be a huge success. If you have a card older than an 8800GT, now is the time to upgrade and that upgrade is the Radeon HD4850. Pros
Cons
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Introduction
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