ATI Radeon HD 4850 Versus NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 Graphics Card

The retail card that we have is the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850, which features an MSRP of $199 and will be the jewel in the price versus performance charts for months to come. It is also the first card that has a TeraFLOP of compute power. Not bad at all for a price tag of just $199!

Here are a pair of cards laying opposite directions, so you can get a feel for the layout of the Radeon HD 4850 series. Sapphire used the reference design from ATI, so the PCB and heat sink should be good to go. Notice the Radeon HD 4850 takes up just a single slot! This is good news and it means that CrossFireX with four cards is possible in boards that have four PCI Express x16 slots.

You’ll notice that the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 has just a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector on the board and that is because it uses just 110 Watts of power during peak usage! The box of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 states that a 450W or greater power supply with a 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connector is recommended for use. If you want to run these cards in CrossFire you’ll need at least a 550W power supply and two 6-pin connectors. The box doesn’t say what you need for 3-way and 4-way CrossFireX and we are still under an embargo on information that isn’t on the box or in the presentation deck, but you can figure out the math on that one.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 comes with two dual-link DVI outputs, an HDTV output and HDMI output support through the DVI-to-HDMI adapters included.

As previously mentioned the board supports CrossFireX for those that want more performance!

If you look at the GPU-Z sceen shot above 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 993MHz. The card has 800 unified shaders and 16 ROPs, which are correctly identified by GPU-Z.