AMD Radeon HD 4850 512MB Video Card Preview – Sapphire

Driver Installation and GPU-Z

We tried to install the press drivers to bring you some benchmark numbers today and all was going good during the installation.

Looks can be deceiving though and at the end of the installation process the final statu of the ATI Display Driver was a failure.

We managed to grab a GPU-Z 0.24 version screen shot for you though. Here you can see some of the basic information of the card. Our Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 was running a core clock of 625MHz and the memory clock was at just 975MHz. The default speed for the memory is 993MHz, so we are not sure why it was reading slower.

With the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 sitting at idle on the desktop for a couple hours we observed It is nice to running at 82C. Without the drivers being installed the card can’t clock down for power savings. Without working video card drivers we can’t test the Radeon HD 4850, so that concludes our preview!

To make things even tougher NVIDIA just released the NDA on the GeForce 9800 GTX+, which is clocked faster than a normal GeForce 9800 GTX! The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is coming out in July and will put some serious pressure on ATI as it will be priced at $229. We have one of these cards with working 64-bit drivers, so stay tuned for a preview of that one real soon. To hold you over here are the stats and a picture:

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+

• MSRP – $229

• Core Clock: 738MHz

• Shader Clocks: 1836MHz

• 512MB of GDDR3: ~1000MHz

Looks like things just got a little more interesting in the $199-$229 price range!