Conclusion
Despite this botched launch, where the Radeon HD 4850 was available even before the press had information about it and the 4870 is still not available, there’s no denying that the 4850 is a very good card. Its performance is only 19% below the GeForce 260 GTX’ and is overall on a par with the GeForce 9800 GTX +, while beating out the 3870 X2! Note that those figures are influenced by the slight factory overclocking of the Asus model tested for this article, but on the other hand they’re adversely affected by the absence of Race Driver: GRID due to the problems we had with our sample card.
Still, the 4850 is already available at a price even lower than expected: $200! Nvidia should be the first to be surprised by that, while their decision to send us a GeForce 9800 GTX + a month before its availability (thus causing a big drop in the GeForce 9800 GTX’ price with some stores are starting to offer it for $199 ), won’t be enough. The GeForce 9800 GTX +, though not uninteresting (since it uses Nvidia’s first 55 µm GPU, with a frequency increased by 9% and a slight drop in power consumption and temperature), only represents a slight improvement in performance compared to the 9800 GTX and it costs more (it’s expected to retail in the neighborhood of $230, with the 9800 GTX’ price dropping a little more in the meantime), and above all it’s not yet available. As of now, in any event, it doesn’t seem to be worth the additional wait, prior to publication of our results of the high-end Radeon HD 4870.
- Pros
- Cons
- Optimized and corrected RV670 architecture
- Performance on a par or slightly better than the GeForce 9800 GTX +
- Antialiasing often performs better than GeForce
- Higher power use and temperature at idle
+ AWARD: The Tom’s Hardware Recommended Buy Award, given to a product that provides the best bang for the buck.
Bottom line as i see it, this is a Smashing card!
Prices on the UK market put a HD4850 at £120 (ebuyer.com) where as the GTX260 is £300! considering the overal performance difference between the two, i'd get 2 HD4850's in Crossfire mode and still be cheaper than a GTX260.
Once again AMD/ATI have produced a card that isnt amazing on performance, but bang for your buck its probably the best card on the market at those prices
The very fact that, yet again, we have a whole page dedicated to noise is a sure sign that these manufacturers still don't have all of the priorities covered. How many years ago was it that THG posted that funny video showing an Nvidia card as a leaf blower & barbecue? - and still we have to put up with substandard cooling solutions. I haven't bought a graphics card for years now without getting an aftermarket heatsink to go with it - thank god for companies like Zalman & Thermalright who are sparing our ears!!
I have seen on the reg that the 4870 more than doubles the performance of a 3870. If this is true and they hit a ~$300 price tag than AMD/ATI are back baby.
Apparently they use 160W at load but beat the 3870 on performance/W by a long way.
Can't wait to see it. Even though I know that this site rakes in more from intel/nvidia.
http://www.pcper.com/images/review [...] 48-bar.jpg
Dual 4870s can take on a 280 no sweat and push for serious performance, and they're supposedly near similar price. By itself the 4870 takes on the $100USD more; 260. I smell price drops.
Thanks to Tom’s Hardware for including the FSX test in these results. It’s interesting to see how differently the cards line up with FSX. No other game produces similar results or shows up the new technology in a different light. To any serious simmer it is the AA/AF performance on big screens that is crucial and this shows the biggest differences and biggest insights. Also it was good to see that my card (an overclocked 8800 GTX) is still top of the pile!
lets just hope that this brings in enough profits to help the CPU market, because if you look at the info on the intel nahalem, it looks as though they have alot more potential, but they dont want to release that potential just yet, where as, if AMD release a competitor then we might just see the nahalems full potential!!