ATI Radeon HD 4850 Preview: AMD Delivers Performance for the Masses
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 19, 2008 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power, Thermals, Noise and Die Size
The Radeon HD 4850 is a single slot design, but the card itself gets very hot. At idle the card is mostly silent, but like the GeForce GTX 280 you can hear this thing once the fan spins up. It's definitely not as loud as the GTX 280, but it's not silent under full load.
The Radeon HD 4850 draws a bit less power than its closest competitor, the GeForce 9800 GTX.
With two 4850s paired up in CrossFire, we once again ran into issues with our power supply. Our 1000W OCZ EliteXStream wasn't always enough for the dual-GPU setup and in Call of Duty 4 our system rebooted in the middle of our test at 2560 x 1600. Thankfully OCZ sent us a PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W unit that is certified for use with GeForce GTX 280 SLI, and if it works on that beast, it had better work with a pair of 4850s in CrossFire.
The PCP&C unit is quite loud as we mentioned in our review, but it got the job done, we were able to run all of our benchmarks without a hiccup after swapping power supplies. Despite AMD's small-GPU strategy, power consumption on multi-GPU configurations is still just as much of a problem as it is for NVIDIA.
The Test
| Test Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme
QX9770 @ 3.20GHz |
| Motherboard | EVGA nForce 790i SLI Intel DX48BT2 |
| Video Cards | ATI Radeon HD 4850 ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 ATI Radeon HD 3870 NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 |
| Video Drivers | Catalyst Catalyst 8.5 ForceWare 177.34 (for GT200) ForceWare 175.16 (everything else) |
| Hard Drive | Seagate 7200.9 120GB 8MB 7200RPM |
| RAM | 4 x 1GB Corsair DDR3-1333 7-7-7-20 |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate
64-bit SP1 |
| PSU | PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
114 Comments
View All Comments
Sunrise089 - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Derrick should really clarify the source of the problem then Jarred. We all know on forums everyone says you need a 600 watt PS to even run integrated graphics, but one reason I love AT's real power draw numbers is that they show how little power most sane systems really need. But casually mentioning a 1KW unit isn't enough for even 4850 CF and not explaining further is about as close to pure FUD as I've seen here.DerekWilson - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
all these tests have been done at Anand's place and at-the-wall power should not be a problem for any of these recent articles.we did have problems with our 1kW thermaltake and our 1kW ocz PSUs with the GTX 280 in SLI. we couldn't get through a crysis run.
in testing 4850 crossfire, the 1kW ocz power supply (elite xtreme) failed during call of duty.
we had no problems with the 1200 W pcp&c turbo cool PSU we now have installed.
our peak power numbers were shown using one of 3dmarks GPU only feature tests. this is in order to isolate GPU power as much as possible for comparison purposes between different graphics cards.
power draw at the wall will be MUCH larger when playing an actual game. this is because the CPU will be under load and system memory will likely be hit harder as well. we will also see the hard disk active as well.
i do apologize for not explaining it further. knowing what app we used to test power would probably have done enought to explain why the PSU crashed under game tests but not under our power test with a 1kW PSU ...
4850 crossfire and up and gt200 sli and up will absolutlely massive ammounts of power to run. we would be the first to say that a 1kW PSU was enough if it were -- but it is not.
semo - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
so how much are you drawing at the wall. just saying "MUCH larger" doesn't mean anything.this also doesn't make much difference as power ratings refer to how much can be delivered to the system - not how much can be pulled from the socket.
in other words, there seems to be some confusion. could we get some clarification the next time you do a review for GPUs (e.g. at 4870's launch)
flagpole - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
I have a 650w Silverstone Zeus ST650ZF powering my system right now, and it's handling a pair of 4850's Crossfire'd fine.Not to mention the 4 harddrives, 5x 120mm fans, Swiftech water pump, an AMD 64X2 4400+ @ 2.7 Ghz, plus various other things like LED's and Cathode tubes sucking back power as well.
HOOfan 1 - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
How about the fact that nvidia has 2 CWT built 1000W systems certified on SLIzone for dual GTX 280.It really perplexes me that you guys think a 1Kw PSU wouldn't be enough for GTX 280 SLi or for 4850 Crossfire. an 800+ Watt PSU should be enough for either. Nvidia even certified the Zalman 850 Watt for dual 9800GX2. Jonnyguru stated that there was a problem specific to the GTX 280 that was not the fault of the PSUs.
I think you guys really ought to have a talk with nVidia and ATI about this before you just claim that a 1Kw PSU isn't enough for dual GPU for these two cards...because quite honestly that claim sounds rather preposterous to me.
strikeback03 - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
I was wondering the same - the review says they had power supply problems with 2 4850s in CF, even though the table directly above says that configuration drew 335.7W total system power.Sunrise089 - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
Why the heck are you guys have power supply failures with this card? I know it draws a decent amount of power, but when you're load numbers are less than HALF the rating of the power supply something seems fishy.BPB - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
I thought these cards are to be better than current ATI cards for HD movies. Did you get a chance to play any movies? And if so, ho was the audio?jay401 - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
75C idle, 90C load is insane, i don't care how well the components can tolerate it. It's like an oven inside your case, and -something- will give eventually on it because those temps are nuts. Why does AMD/ATI have such trouble putting out reasonably-temped cards even after yet another die shrink? :(Clauzii - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
They used the die-shrink to ramp up performance, which they needed AND achieved :)I hope some Arctic cooling solution will show up even though two slots might be used.