The Radeon HD 4850 & 4870: AMD Wins at $199 and $299
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 25, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Witcher
The Witcher continues the trend of the 4870 surpassing the 9800GTX+ by a wide margin and edging out the more expensive GTX 260. It even blows well past its own brother the 4850. Here we see the additional memory bandwidth of the 4870 makes itself very prominent with a 39% boost in performance over the 4850, well beyond just the improvement in core speed. Although both cards offer framerates we'd consider playable at our stock resolution of 1920x1200, the 4870 is definitely the much more comfortable choice, with plenty of headroom for features such as additional anti-aliasing beyond just 2x.
Finally, it's interesting to note that the 4870 and the 3870 X2 are neck-and-neck until we finally crank up the resolution to 2560x1600, at which point the 3870 X2 pulls ahead. This is not what we would have expected. The HD4000 series seems to scale just a bit worse with resolutionthan either NVIDIA's cards or the HD3000 series.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
215 Comments
View All Comments
iamap - Friday, June 27, 2008 - link
I'm looking to buy the 4870 from newegg when they get back in stock next week but I'm not familiar with any of the manufactures, except for Diamond, and I had problems with Diamond years ago.Diamond
HIS
Powercolor
Sapphire Technology Limited
VisionTek
Any advice, especially ones to avoid?
feelingshorter - Friday, June 27, 2008 - link
Go with the one with the warranty. Which would be visiontech life time warranty. Asus does offer a 3 year warranty also.Nehemoth - Friday, June 27, 2008 - link
Check this onehttp://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/">http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/
Gannon - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
No supreme commander? :-Odesignerfx - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
http://bensbargains.net/deal/69638/">http://bensbargains.net/deal/69638/195 -> 20$ rebate newegg -> 20$ rebate bensbargains = $155!
To think this card will get cheaper yet!
I'm buying one asap. This is a freakin steal at 150 bucks.
QEFX - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
Heck, pick up 2. $310 for CF 4850s! Now there's "bang for the buck" on games that actually work properly with crossfire.Jjunior130 - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
can i haz quantum physix? lolMustanggt - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
I was watching the 8800GT SLI and it was in the top 2 most of the test, for less than the price of 2 4870s i could pick up a SLI board and another 8800 GT. perhaps also a E8400 to equal the $600 on 2 of these 4870s in CF. I am talking about the resolution i use that the 8800GT was looking very good in SLI 1680x1050BusterGoode - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
I'd like to see the differnce the GDDR5 made and since clocking the 4850 up may not be possible right now it would be nice to see the 4870 slowed down. If this has been asked or done sorry so much info pouring out now it is hard to keep up, thanks!DerekWilson - Sunday, June 29, 2008 - link
this is an interesting request ... we'll look at the possibility ...