It can't get any closer

Preview: ASUS EAH4850 512MB TOP

Starting off with ATI's Radeon HD 4850 512MB cards, we take a look at ASUS's own rendition of the Radeon HD 4850.

This particular model of theirs comes factory overclocked to 680MHz core and 1050MHz memory, up from the official specifications of 625MHz core and 993MHz memory.

 

ASUS EAH4850 TOP with an ASUS girl sticker. Note the card is using a reference design.

 

Like most of the other cards out in the market (cards with after-market cooling solutions or custom PCBs are slowly streaming into the market), the ASUS EAH4850 TOP is based on the ATI reference design. The difference between cards from various manufacturers well.. actually lies with the different stickers placed on the plastic shroud of the heatsink only.

The Radeon HD 4850 employs the services of a single-slot heatsink fan solution for cooling.

The power consumption of a Radeon HD 4850 requires the implementation of only one PCI Express power connector.

 

The back of the ASUS EAH4850 TOP. This is exactly what you will on other cards based on the reference design.

 

 A metal backplate is placed at the back of the card to prevent excessive warping due to contact pressure between the heatsink and the RV770 core.

 

ASUS added a nice touch by packing everything in a nice black box with 'gold' lettering.

 

 

Preview: PowerColor HD 4850 512MB

Next up, we have the Powercolor HD 4850 512MB. This card is also based on the ATI reference design, and is clocked similarly as well at 625MHz core, and 993MHz memory.

 

The PowerColor HD 4850 512MB card.

 

 

The rear of the PowerColor HD 4850 512MB, which reveals an ATI reference design.

 

As we mentioned earlier on, most manufacturers use the ATI reference design. One can only differentiate the cards from different manufacturers by the labels on it.

 

A single 6-pin PCI Express power connector on the Radeon HD 4850.

 

 

ATI CrossFire (up to 4-way) ready.

 

Hot air from the graphics card is exhausted towards the back of the card. The downside is that the exhausted air gets circulated around the casing as you cannot get the hot air exhausted out of the case. Dual-slot solutions are better in this aspect, but of course, you lose the use of the neighbouring card slot.

 

Preview: Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Also here in our labs is Sapphire's latest graphics offering, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which is well, another ATI reference card again.

 

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB, on ATI's reference board.

 

 

Rear of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB.

 

 

Two dual-link DVI and an S-Video output.

 

Sapphire's bundled software seems more impressive than the competition. We have Futuremark's 3DMark06, which a serial key for registration, a Ruby demo (!) and CyberLink's PowerDVD and PowerDVD Suite.

 

Five CDs in one package!

 

But that's not all, Sapphire also threw in a free 2GB USB thumbdrive!

 

Cute little thumbdrive from Sapphire!

 

 

Preview: Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Okay, we're done with the Radeon HD 4850 cards. Now lets move on to the bigger and badder brother of the HD 4850, the HD 4870. This card has been labeled as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX crusher in terms of price-performance ratio.

First, we have the Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Force3D is the ATI arm of Innovision, who markets NVIDIA products under the Inno3D brand name. The Force3D card is based completely on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 reference design. A sticker was pasted over the original heatsink to indicate it is a product by Force3D. Clocks of this card are 750MHz and 900MHz respectively for core and memory.

 

The Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which is based off the ATI reference design.

 

 

The rear of the Radeon HD 4870 512MB.

 

The Radeon HD 4870 employs a dual-slot cooling solution, allowing all the hot air from the graphics card to be exhausted directly out of the case. This prevents heat build up within a system and maintains system temperature during long periods of graphics-intensive usage. The downside is the loss of being able to use the neighbouring card slot as the cooler will take up the space of one card.

 

Dual-slot cooling solution ensures hot air is exhausted out of the case and not recycled.

 

The Radeon HD 4870 requires more juice, and we get two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors on this card, similar to what we find on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra, 9800 GTX/GTX+ and GTX 260.

 

Dual 6-pin PCI Express power connectors on the Radeon HD 4870 512MB.

 

 

Like the Radeon HD 4850, the Radeon HD 4870 is also ATI CrossFire-ready.

 

 

Preview: Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Not only do we have the Force3D Radeon HD 4870, we also have the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB. It's based also on the ATI reference design, and has ATI reference clocks of 750MHz and 900MHz for the core and memory respectively.

 

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB, also on the ATI reference design.

 

 

Dual 6-pin connectors to supply power to this card.

 

As we can see, the blower is PWM-controlled. The fan is kept at approximately 20% fan speed most of the time, rising a little to say, slightly below 30% during heavy loading. Similar to the Radeon HD 4850, the expense of attempting to silence the blower here results in a really, really toasty card.

 

Similar to the Radeon HD 4850, a metal backplate is used.

 

 

Two heatpipes to channel heat faster from the RV770 core.

 

 

Preview: XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MB

After going through a stack of cards from ATI, we move on to check out NVIDIA's GT200-based GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280. First up would be the GeForce GTX 260 by one of NVIDIA's partners, XFX.

XFX has done it again by presenting to us an eye-catching impressive-looking card.

 

The XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MB, based on NVIDIA's reference design.

 

The GeForce GTX 260 uses the same cooling design and backplate as the GeForce 9800 GTX - a cooler that exhausts air out of the casing only, a large vent, and two DVI outputs.

 

By exhausting all the hot air out, this prevents heat build-up within any system.

 

The rear of the GeForce GTX 260 has 'vents' as well for better heat dissipation, rather than a complete plastic cover which would trap heat instead. The design of the GT200 card is such that there will be memory chips on the back of the PCB, and this plastic shroud is in contact with these chips and it acts like a large heatsink.

 

Two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors - similar to the GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra and 9800 GTX/GTX+.

 

 

The GeForce GTX 260 is NVIDIA Tri SLI-ready.

 

Just beneath the blower is where the PWM of the GeForce GTX sits. The heatsink fan unit used on the GeForce GTX 260 is identical to the one on the GeForce GTX 280. The only difference lies with the front plastic shroud only because the GTX 260 uses two 6-pin PCI-E connectors compared to the GTX 280's one 8-pin and one 6-pin configuration.

 

The GeForce GTX 260 blower, similar to the one on the GeForce GTX 280.

 

XFX gives you a card to hang at your door, probably it would be good enough to stop that annoying brother of yours from entering the room while you're gaming.

Not only that, XFX throws in one of the latest games available on the market, Assassin's Creed.

 

XFX doesn't give you a heap of software, they prefer to give you the latest games...

 

(XFX is giving up to US$ 120 cashback to US/Canada customers who bought either their GeForce GTX 260 or GeForce GTX 280 cards between 16 June 2008 to 11 July 2008, after NVIDIA officially reduced pricings of the GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 to US$ 299 and US$ 499 respectively.)

 

Preview: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB

No current high-end graphics card slugfest can do without the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB card. Like the G80-based GeForce 8800 Ultra and G92-based GeForce 9800 GX2, the GeForce GTX 280 enjoys the luxury of carrying the 'performance king' tag, but looking at the way things are headed now, it would very soon that NVIDIA would lose the performance crown (finally) to AMD/ATI when they push out their Radeon HD 4870 X2 next month officially.

We did a review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB card last month, and it could be found here.

 

A fully reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB card.

 

 

The back of the GeForce GTX 280. Having a back cover adds a little protection to the PCB.

 

 

The back of the card. Dual dual-link DVI outputs and a single S-Video ouput are available.
Also, hot air is expelled from the vents above the display connectors.

 

 

HDMI audio output similar to that of the GeForce 9800 family. Power is a 6-and-8-pin combination like the GeForce 9800 GX2.

 

 

Test setup and test notes

Here's a list of the parts used for our test setup.

 

Processor	Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (3GHz, 12MB L2) @ 4GHz
Motherboard	ASUS P5E3 Premium (Intel X48 Express)
Memory	Corsair Dominator 2GB 1800MHz DDR3 Kit
Graphics Cards / Drivers	ASUS EAH4850 TOP 512MB (680/1050MHz) - 8.6 Hotfix PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 512MB (625/993MHz) - 8.6 Hotfix Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB (625/993MHz) - 8.6 Hotfix Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB (750/900MHz) - 8.6 Hotfix Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB (750/900MHz) - 8.6 Hotfix XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MB (576/1242/999MHz) - 177.41 WHQL NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB (602/1296/1107MHz) - 177.41 WHQL
Cooler	Scythe Zipang
Storage	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA x 2
Power Supply	Enermax Galaxy 1000W
Operating System	Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit w/ SP1

 

 

 

Benchmarking notes

 

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage - Two sets of tests were run on 3DMark Vantage. The first is the 'standard' Performance preset, followed by the highest option available, the Extreme preset. The latest 3DMark Vantage version was used for this review.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - Testing was carried out at three resolutions of 1680 x 1050 (on 22-inch widescreens), 1920 x 1200 (on 24-inchers) and card-killing 2560 x 1600 (on 30-inchers). We dropped our custom timedemo test and opted for HOC's ETQW benchmark.

Crysis - The same three resolution settings were used for Crysis. We used Crysis Benchmarking Tool. Game quality was set to either completely High or completely Very High. No AA or forced AF was used.

World in Conflict - Game quality was set at High and Very High. The differences are the level of AA/AF as well as some extra eye-candy processing. On a side note, Medium triggers DX9 rendering instead of DX10.

Unreal Tournament 3 - Processing was set to Intense, while we forced 4x AA and 16x AF from the the ATI Catalyst Control Centre or the NVIDIA Control Panel. UT3Bench was used for this test, and all imaging options were set to the highest available (level 5).

 

 

Temperature and noise levels testing notes

 

To test load temperature, we left HWMonitor opened while looping Futuremark 3DMark06 game tests for about 45 minutes to mark the highest operating temperature. After that, we allowed the system to idle for about 20 minutes to note the idle temperature.

For our noise level tests, we removed the noisy Delta sitting on top of our Scythe Zipang and replaced it with a 1600rpm Scythe S-Flex. The only other audible peripheral would be the fan in the Enermax Galaxy.

We left the graphics card fan in automatic mode first, looping Futuremark 3DMark06 game tests for about 45 minutes while taking note of any changes in fan noise.

Next, we slowly cranked up the fan speed until it is audible and note the percentage.

Finally, we listened to the noise levels for all the cards at 50% fan speed and 100% fan speed. Changing the fan speed on the ATI cards was done by creating a profile and editing the XML file. Changing the fan speed on the NVIDIA cards was much easier with the help of Rivatuner.

 

Benchmarking: Futuremark 3DMark Vantage and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

There has been a lot of focus on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB delivering performance that is rather close to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB for 'a fraction of the cost' when the GeForce GTX 280 was still retailing at a sky-high price. The GeForce GTX 260 896MB was completely forgotten because of its equally poor pricing and was written off before it was put to the test.

 

 

The Futuremark 3DMark Vantage results were pretty much expected, with the CrossFire setups producing scores higher than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB.

 

 

Interestingly, the GeForce GTX 260 896MB pulls ahead of the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset. The Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup returns some impressive scores, but when comparing a single HD 4870 to a GTX 280, it runs quite short of steam.

 

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In our revamped Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark, the GeForce GTX 260 896MB has the upper hand over the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, running at least ten frames per second more across all resolutions. The GeForce GTX 280 1GB steers clear of these two cards, posting a much higher result, but it was easily overrun by the ATI CrossFire setups.

 

 

When AA and AF was introduced, the GeForce GTX 260 takes a more serious performance hit compared to the Radeon HD 4870. Frame rates for these two cards are almost the same. If you noticed, the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup is giving close to a 100% boost in performance over a single HD 4870, which is very evident in this AA and AF test...

 

Benchmarking: Crysis, World in Conflict and Unreal Tournament 3

 

The GeForce GTX 260 manages to edge out the Radeon HD 4870 in Crysis High Quality benchmark. The GeForce GTX 280 gives about 25% higher frames over the Radeon HD 4870. The two CrossFire setups have better performance over the GTX 280, but stumble at the high resolution of 2560 x 1600.

Slotting two GeForce GTX 260 cards into an SLI board would probably make things playable on High Quality at 2560 x 1600, but not so for ATI's Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 CrossFire setups.

 

 

The ATI Radeon cards take a big hit in performance at 2560 x 1600, with the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire returning a poorer result as compared to a single HD 4870.

The bottom line is this: With all the cards/CrossFire setups we have tested for this article, Crysis is still unplayable at Very High Quality settings, even the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire.

 

 

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A very close call between the GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 cards here. I'll be hard-pressed to choose a better card if I was given only this graph. The GeForce GTX 280 gives an approximate 20% jump over the Radeon HD 4870, while the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup produces about 30% better results over the GTX 280.

 

 

We see a similar type of result between the High Quality and Very High Quality benchmarks. The GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 are level, while the GeForce GTX 280 sits in between the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 CrossFire setups.

 

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The GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 are neck-to-neck in our Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark - no more than four frames separate each other. The GeForce GTX 280 pulls ahead comfortably from its younger brother. Needless to say, the two-card solutions top the graphs. As observed earlier on, the HD 4870 CrossFire setup scales well, especially at high resolution. 

 

 

The GeForce GTX 260 continues playing its sneaky game, but this time round, it manages to outrun the Radeon HD 4870 by quite a margin for the low- and mid-resolution tests. The gap narrows considerably at high resolution, but it still gets ahead by six-odd frames per second.

Seems like there's a slip-up by AMD here, its Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire setup pales in comparison to the single-card GeForce GTX 280. The Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire is still quicker than the GTX 280 and we can see it actually returns close to 100% frame rate improvement across all resolutions over a single HD 4870 in this benchmark.

 

NVIDIA and PhysX

Originally developed by Ageia, PhysX is a propietary real-time physics engine middleware. NVIDIA bought Aegia and their PhysX engine in February this year, allowing NVIDIA to integrate PhysX into its CUDA framework.

In the past, a PhysX PPU from Ageia was required to provide hardware acceleration for PhysX, offloading physics calculations from a system's CPU, allowing the CPU to be free physics processing and thus increasing frame rates.

 

 

By enabling PhysX on a supporting GeForce GPU, we get an increase in scores in Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage which includes a physics test. By offloading the physics calculation to a GPU, which is many, many times much more powerful, benchmark scores can sky-rocket because the rendering is no longer limited by a 'comparatively much slower' CPU.

 

 

Enabling GeForce-based PhysX makes the GeForce card taking over physics calculations instead of having the CPU to do the job. The result is a staggering three-fold increase in CPU scores.

This is a demostration of how much computing power a GPU has in it, but unfortunately, you do not stand to gain anything if the game does not support PhysX.

 

Power consumption, operating temperatures and noise levels

 

Both GeForce GTX cards draw much lesser power compared to their Radeon HD counterparts on idle.

 

 

The GeForce GTX 260 draws slightly lesser power than the Radeon HD 4870. The GeForce GTX 280 draws about 50W more than the Radeon HD 4870, but the Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire setup draws even more power. The Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup is the ultimate power guzzler in our roundup, registering a wee bit over half a kilowatt on our trusty power meter.

 

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Not only do the GeForce GTX cards consume much less power during idle, they also run very cool - a whopping 30ºC cooler than the Radeon HD cards. It is believed that the drivers for the Radeon cards need some fixing to reduce power draw and temperatures.

 

 

NVIDIA still has the cooler cards even on full load. The largest difference comes from the GeForce GTX 260 when compared to the Radeon HD 4870 - 15ºC lower on the GTX 260. A single Radeon HD 4870 card in CrossFire runs at 87ºC, having two of those in your system gives you a free room warmer for the cool seasons.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX cards can be touched all round during our load testing. Yes they are warm, but we are still able to hold our fingers on the card. It might be due to the added plastic shroud behind (it actually also comes in contact with the rear GDDR3 chips) which acts as some form of a mini-barrier. However, it was a totally different story on the ATI cards - even the shroud covering the heatsink was scorching hot. We could not hold our fingers on the plastic shroud for more than a second. The back of the PCB was almost untouchable.

 

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 Noise Levels

 

HD 4850 CF	Automatic	Cannot be heard over the rest of our system.
	Audible	Fan speed at 30% produces noticeable whirl which is of a slight high-pitch nature.
	50%	Very noticeable.
	100%	Loud!
HD 4870	Automatic	Cannot be heard over the rest of our system.
	Audible	Fan speed at 30% starts to produce noticeable fan noise.
	50%	Noise level scales exponentially with this card, almost as loud as HD 4850 CF at 100%.
	100%	Mini hairdryer. The pitch is not as high as the HD 4850.
HD 4870 CF	Automatic	Cannot be heard over the rest of our system.
	Audible	Similar to a single HD 4870, fan noise is noticeable once we cross 30%, just that it is louder now since we're on two cards.
	50%	Wow.
	100%	Mini hairdryer's big brother.
GTX 280	Automatic	Cannot be heard over the rest of our system.
	Audible	Fan speed at 45% starts to produce noticeable fan noise.
	50%	Pretty noticeable fan noise if you are in front of the card.
	100%	The rush of air can be heard, but not obtrusive because the pitch is low.
GTX 260	Automatic	Similar to GTX 280. It's the same unit.
	Audible
	50%
	100%

 

 

Who are the real winners?

ATI has made a strong comeback this time round, this is partly made possible by NVIDIA being complacent, although the green men are still hanging on, but barely.

The performance by a Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire setup easily gives it the VR-Zone Best Value award. For just shy of US$ 400, you're getting performance that's slightly faster than NVIDIA's flagship in most instances. The downside of running ATI CrossFire would be the power consumption and heat output though. ATI's drivers still needs some polishing for CrossFire setups. During the course of our testing, we noticed strange and random artifacts appearing in our Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark, as well as micro-stutters which occur very randomly as well in other softwares.

 

Awarded to ATI Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire

 

 

The GeForce GTX 260 896MB has shown that it is no pushover against the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Considering both cards in full factory form without any user modifications (manual fan speed adjustments, etc.), the NVIDIA card gains the upper hand with its considerably lower operating temperatures and lower power consumption. It should be noted that all the manufacturers are using the NVIDIA reference board or the ATI reference board, and differences would actually come down to what's included in the package. Furthermore, with price adjustments done by NVIDIA last week, the GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 now have the same suggested retail price of US$ 299.

Based on the cards we have in our labs today for the GeForce GTX 260 and the Radeon HD 4870 from XFX and Force3D and Sapphire, we would be giving the VR-Zone Best Buy award to the XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MB after very careful consideration.

 

Awarded to XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MB

 

 

Needless to say, the VR-Zone Performance Award goes to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup which we put together both the Force3D and the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB cards. You get the best performance definitely, but with it comes a big jump in power consumption. You may want to consider adjusting fan speeds manually on the CrossFire setup to keep temperatures down within your casing as well.

 

Awarded to ATI Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire

 

 

Despite being run over by the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire, and the Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire in most instances, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 still retains the performance crown for a single card solution. Dual card solutions should be outperforming single card parts. For example, running a pair of NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS in SLI is sure to outperform a single GeForce 8800 GTX. You can put two GeForce GTX 260 in SLI and it'll eat your GeForce GTX 280 for breakfast too. If you absolutely need the fastest card today in a single card solution, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB is your answer. The price for the GeForce GTX 280 has also been adjusted downwards to US$ 499. In comparision, a faster dual card Radeon HD 4870 solution will set you back by just shy of US$ 600.

 

 

	ASUS EAH4850 512MB TOP
	PowerColor HD 4850 512MB
	Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB
	Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB
	Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB
	XFX GeForce GTX 260 896MB

 

It's a good thing that AMD/ATI managed to stage a comeback in the graphics world. If not for them, we would be seeing nothing but absurdly high prices on NVIDIA's high-end cards (and possibly even the mid-range models). The RV770 has proved its worth against the aging G92 and the new GT200 architectures. If the scaling performance on the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire setup is to be replicated on the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and ATI fixes its heat issues, we believe NVIDIA would not have any answer to the R700 for at least a few months to come.