This means ATI has been able to use a single slot cooler for its reference design, which both cards we’re looking at today have utilised. Neither include any free games or other software but considering the approximately £120 asking price this is hardly surprising.Īs a result of the cut down clock and memory speeds the cards consume less power and consequently kick out less heat than HD 4870. This understandably means the Asus card will cost a little more but the choice is there if you want a tad more performance.īoth cards come with the exact same bundle that includes converters for DVI-to-HDMI, DVI-to-VGA, S-video to composite, and S-video to component as well as a CrossfireX connector. range, which means it comes overclocked to 680MHz(core) and 2,100MHz(memory) straight out of the box. Powercolor’s card is running stock clocks while Asus’ is from its T.O.P. However, when it comes to the card itself there are some significant differences.Īsus and Powercolor were the first board partners to get cards to us for review. There’s nothing more to say about the architecture of HD 4850 that hasn’t already been said in our in-depth HD 4870 review. However, the core clock speed has been reduced by 17 per cent and memory speed by 45 per cent, which should result in a performance differential that sits somewhere within that percentage range – exactly what the difference will be will differ from game to game.Īnd that really is it. So, in essence you still get 800 stream processors, 40 texture address/ filtering units, and 16 ROPs, as well as the 256-bit wide memory interface – although the memory chips themselves are GDDR3 instead of the GDDR5 seen on the HD 4870. The differences are confined to clock speed and memory configuration. In fact, unlike the nVidia GTX 260, which uses the same chip as the GTX 280 but with a few sections disabled, the HD 4850 uses the full extent of RV770. Like its more expensive sibling, the ATI HD 4850 is based on ATI’s new RV770 chip. Still, there are many of us that would balk at the idea of spending nearly £200 on a graphics card, regardless of how fast it is, which is where the ATI HD 4850 comes in. It isn’t quite the fastest graphics card you can buy – that honour goes to nVidia’s GTX 280 – but it performs very well and comes in at a quite phenomenal price. You may have gathered over the last couple of weeks that we really like the ATI HD 4870.
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