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HIS Radeon HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX Many of you e-mailed in over the past couple of years wanting us to put the Futuremark synthetic benchmarks back in the mix. I heard and will bend to the masses. Here's a look at Futuremark's 3DMark06 and Vantage benchmarking programs... as requested. The 3DMark Vantage showed our overclocked HIS HD4850 to take a 800+ point lead over the reference design. Impressive.
We selected Crysis and Assassin's Creed to have a look at Image Quality. Rather then me telling you what looks good and what doesn't, you be the judge. The Crysis screen shot below was taken at 1024 resolution with FSAA set to 4x and all other settings set to Very High. Game play was tolerable at this level but only just. My thoughts were that showing you some super high end eye candy that isn't playable, I'm not really helping you. So below is the best quality Crysis could dish out in our test bed while at a minimally tolerable frame rate. Assassin's Creed is at max quality at 1920 resolution just like in our benchmark.
Overclocking After playing around with the Catalyst Auto Tune Panel we finally found our maximum ceilings for the GPU and memory. Now keep in mind that the factory core clock is 625MHz on the reference design with the memory speed being 2GHz. HIS's HD4850 IceQ4 Turbo is overclocked at the factory (and retains its warranty) to 685MHz for the GPU and 2.2GHz for the memory. So we already have a significant overclock right out of the box. Pushing things further we tapped out the Catalyst Overdrive at 700MHz on the core. I'm sure the card can do more but, 700MHz is the limit for the ATi driver overclock tab. Lots of other programs are around allowing for further and higher exploration. The memory tapped out at 2280MHz. While an additional 80MHz doesn't seem all that great, keep in mind that this should be looked at as a 280MHz boost over the reference speeds. Conclusion What took them so long? HIS has taken a great card and made it even better by addressing the only real two points of concern with the HD4850; sound and temperature. We've never had a "loud" HD4850 come though our doors but their sound signature under load is discernable. And even at this level, the reference design coolers would only keep the HD4850s at load around the 80 degree Celsius mark. HIS by tooling up their IceQ4 Cooler not only made their card silent but were able to do that and make the card operate some 20 degrees C cooler than others. Keeping in mind the whole time that the HIS HD4850 card comes with a factory overclock that does more than justify a fancy sticker on the box and still leaves you a warranty. The Radeon HD4850 continues to be the best value video card available today. Now don't let "best value" fool you. This is not the card from your momma's $299 Dell. The HIS HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX is able to tackle any current game on the market today and give you respectable performance. Upping the screen resolution beyond 1600 x 1200 and running excessive FSAA will certainly bog this card down fast. But that is not what this card is all about; it's about great game play for the masses. HIS has done a great job with their tuned up Radeon HD4850. The HIS card does carry a bit of a higher sticker price than vanilla HD4850s. Searching out Newegg it seems like the IceQ4 TurboX is going to cost you an extra $25. But the factory overclock seems to give you your money's worth from what we can see here and that is without even mentioning the cooler. Hats off to HIS on a fantastic variant of a fantastic card. Here is a quick link to the HIS HD4850 IcQ4 TurboX at Newegg if you feel the card is as worthy as we do. Pros
Cons
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Introduction
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