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The Radeon HD 4850 & 4870: AMD Wins at $199 and $299
The Radeon HD 4850 & 4870: AMD Wins at $199 and $299
Date: June 25th, 2008
Topic: Video Card
Manufacturer: AMD
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson
Buy the XFX HD-485X-YDFC Radeon 4850 512MB
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 Newegg $119.99
 
 

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 shows the Radeon HD 4870 outperforming the Geforce GTX 260, despite being priced $100 more than AMD's offering. What's interesting is that while at 1920 x 1200 the Radeon HD 4870 is nearly 11% faster than the GTX 260, the two perform the same at 2560 x 1600. It's not a memory bandwidth limitation since the 4870 has tons of it, so it looks like we're running into some sort of a processing power limitation.

The 4870 also nips at the heels of the GeForce GTX 280, but it cannot catch up to the performance offered by two GeForce 8800 GTs in SLI thanks to excellent SLI scaling here. As we've already seen, the Radeon HD 4850 is not only faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX but also the new 55nm GeForce 9800 GTX+.


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174 Comments - Last by calumhm, 70 days ago
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very good by weaksideblitz, 513 days ago
this is a welcome development although im only buying a 4850 :)

Reply
RE: very good by Lifted, 513 days ago
Ditto. If I can get a 4850 for ~$150 or so, that's what I'm doing as well.

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RE: very good by Clauzii, 513 days ago
That leaves 50 for a better cooler ;)

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RE: very good by Lifted, 513 days ago
Is there any reason the first pages of benchmarks have SLI setups included in the charts, but you wait until the end of the article to add the CF? I'd think it would make the most sense to either include both from the start or hold both until the end.

Reply
RE: very good by Anand Lal Shimpi, 513 days ago
The original idea was to format it like the 4850 preview, keep things simple early on but offer SLI/CF graphs later in the article for those who wanted them.

It looks like in the mad rush to get things done it didn't work out that way, I'll see if it's possible to clean it all up but right now we've got a lot of other minor touchups to do first :)

Take care,
Anand

Reply
RE: very good by wilkinb, 513 days ago
Then include SLI for the 280... let the consumer care about what the value is or isn't, we all value different things. Provide the costs and the performance (SLI) please.

Its make this very incomplete to not have included SLI for the 280/260, I for one will more then likely get 2 x GTX280's not all of us worry about a few $$, but if the CF 4870's are that good, then I want to know as I don’t care about the brand and will go with the best performance.

Can you please include them soon so we can make our own judgements on what's good or not?

Reply
RE: very good by Anand Lal Shimpi, 513 days ago
I've added the GTX 280 SLI numbers to all of the bar charts in the Multi-GPU section, enjoy :)

Note, I didn't add them to the line graphs simply because we didn't have data for 280 SLI at lower resolutions. It only really makes sense at 2560 x 1600 anyways so this shouldn't be an issue.

Take care,
Anand

Reply
RE: very good by wilkinb, 513 days ago
thank you :)

I really appreciate the response

Now I just need work out what to order.

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RE: very good by paydirt, 512 days ago
9800 GTX is $200. I wonder what price the GTX+ debuts at.

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RE: very good by TechLuster, 513 days ago
Anand,

I really like your idea of "keeping things simple early on" by only including configurations that us mere mortals can afford at first (say, all single-GPU configs plus "reasonable" multi-GPU configs less than ~$400 total), and then including numbers for ultra high-end multi-GPU configs at the end (mainly just for completeness and also for us to drool over--I doubt too many people can afford more than one $650 card!).

Anyway, great job on the review as always. I think you and Derek should get some well-deserved rest now!

-TL

Reply
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