Product: PowerColor HD 4850
Website: www.powercolor.com
Price: tbc ($200-ish)

WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S worst kept secret. Come June 26th, ATI was supposed to unleash its brand new RV770 marchitecture – which was OK by most people, but nobody (ATI, partners or hacks like us) kept with the programme.

We’ve been beavering away in our lab and we’ve come to two distinct conclusions about the HD4850 / RV770 product – it’s pretty good and it’s pretty hot. Now “good” in the mainstream is usually a measurement of price/performance, and although we haven’t yet received the MSRP for this Powercolor version, we’ve seen prices in the region of 150 €urobucks. Applying the Law of Inevitable Euroscrew, those 150 €urobucks translate to about 200 USD which pits the card against the 9800GTX.

The specs on the HD4850 have been amply disclosed, but we’ll recap: The RV770 core is built on a 55nm process, has a 256mm2 die and 800 unified shaders. The HD 4850 uses 512MB of GDDR3 flowing through a 256-bit bus. The default GPU clock is 625MHz, 993MHz memory but GPU-Z still doesn’t recognize a shader clock. Here’s our GPU-Z shot taken on our system. We’re using an X38 mobo from Intel on this one, so we’ve got PCIe 2.0 although from what we’ve seen on other sites, it doesn’t seem to make a difference in any aspect.

The Powercolor package includes everything you need, from a DVI->HDMI adapter to a Crossfire bridge (a wink at their customers – “Hey, go buy yourself another card”). No games, though, so it’s WYSIWYG. A cursory analysis of the card doesn’t reveal anything astonishing about it, except the single slot cooler that really is compact in design and the dual Crossfire connectors that will allow you to hook up to four of these cards if you like. Ah. It uses just a single six-pin power PCIe power connector and according to the specs, you only need a 450W PSU to operate the whole system (bear in mind, they probably aren't thinking QX CPUs).

Some like it hot…
First things first: AIB partners had no time to doodle with the HD 4850’s cooler and replace it with something better – so all of the available cards are reference designs (as opposed to the HD 3850/3870s). You get the same blow-dryer action on all the cards. What you also get is a nagging feeling there’s something seriously wrong with the heat venting out of the card.

The HD 4850 idles anywhere between 62 and 70 celsius… Put your hand to any part of the copper surface and you’ll feel the heat (ouch), however, the fan doesn’t seem to speed up or down (except at boot… *whoosh*) and what little air it vents isn’t even hot. The fan’s power connector does look like PWM, but nothing’s going on… Performance and stability, however, are rock solid, even after a few hours of non-stop looping 3D benchmarks.

The Numbers
As far as we can tell, DAAMIT’s done a great job with the RV770 marchitecture (or at least with the HD4850). While the HD3870 and HD3850 felt slightly outgunned by Nvidia’s G92, the RV770 looks like it’s inverted that particular trend. We’ve got some numbers for you, with a 9600GT OC for comparison.

3DMark06 is usually “generous” with ATI but you can’t deny the fact that even under 8xAA/8xAF the HD4850 performs very well. Not GX2- or X2- well, but very well indeed.

Call of Juarez w/ the DX10 Pack Benchmark also shows some significant gains…

World in Conflict… what can we say? ATI’s HD4850 is kicking the competition where it hurts. Even at Very High settings, the game is extremely playable.

Lightmark gives us a feel for what the RV770 marchitecture can do in OpenGL. Considering that OpenGL is used in some Pro apps, gaming isn't really the target here.

The Overclock
You’ll pardon us if we don’t show you a GPU-Z cap with the overclock, but… we’ll update the graphics on the article soon-ish. Using the ATI Overdrive tool, we got another odd experience with this card. Hot as it may be, the HD4850 core on Overdrive overclocked to a successful 690MHz/1069MHz and, although there are still a few benchmarks to be run on this system, temps seem stable. We’ll update this article with a new graph with the 690MHz OC (that’s +65MHz over stock)… if the cores don’t melt on us.

The Reaction
Nvidia has announced price drops and a rapid response to DAAMIT’s 4850 in the form of the suped-up 9800GTX+. This card will retail at $229 and the original 9800GTX will drop down to $199, meeting ATI on its own ground. However, availability and performance seem to give ATI a little edge over the 9800GTX. The single best improvement in the HD4850 seems to be AA performance. Previous marchitectures were fighting an uphill battle with Nvidia when it came to AA, but now, this particular card copes with FSAA much better.

The greatest thing ATI has got going for it is one of the Creator’s great cosmic ironies: Intel. Right now if you want the best CPU around then you buy Intel, that’s pretty much a given, but Intel chipsets don’t support SLI, so if you want multi-GPU madness, you go straight to DAAMIT. Essentially Intel is responsible for keeping AMD’s ATI business in the black

The Good – ATI seems to have overcome the AA hurdle quite successfully, single slot design, price seems right.

The Bad – All the cards are reference so: test one, test all, until some sticks an aftermarket cooler, that is…

The Ugly – The core temps… AT IDLE.

Bartender’s Rating