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| Introduction, Specifications and Features | |||||||
No matter what you think of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series of video cards, you'd be crazy not to love what AMD did with the pricing of the first two cards (Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870) from the series. As a result of AMD's aggressive pricing, NVIDIA felt compelled to lower the price of its latest GeForce video cards, the GeForce GTX 260 and the GTX 280. It's not often that ATI can actually make NVIDIA fans smile as big as its own or vice versa. Ultimately, though, you don't have to favor one brand over the other to appreciate the downward pressure that the new Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 put on pricing. Overall, we've been quite impressed with what we've seen of the HD 4800 Series, especially considering the amount of power the cards offer for the price. In this article, we are going to take a look at a card from one of AMD/ATI's primary board partners, MSI. The card up to bat today is the MSI R4850 512M, which as you can no doubt surmise, is a Radeon HD 4850.
The R4850 512M sports 512MB of DDR3 and reference clock speeds. Although it does not feature a factory overclock, the card does sport a custom cooler that promises to keep the GPU much cooler than ATI's reference cooler. As we told you in our ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series launch article, the HD 4800 Series' RV770 GPU boasts 956 million transistors on a 55nm fabrication process. To see how well the MSI R4850 512M performs, we'll pit it against a Radeon HD 4870, a Radeon HD 3850, a GeForce GTX 260 and a couple GeForce 9800 GTXs.
If you peruse the list of specs and features above, you see that the Radeon HD 4800 Series cards feature support for DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. Additionally, the cards support ATI's CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology, which is undoubtedly a must-have feature for enthusiasts. Those of you who are familiar with the Radeon HD 3800 Series have probably noticed that there are a lot of similarities between the two lines. Because we've already extensively covered the technology behind both the HD 3800 and HD 4800 Series, we won't rehash those details here. If you want to learn more about the technologies employed by ATI, take a look at the following articles:
Now that we've introduced you to the HD 4800 Series, let's take a closer look at the MSI R4850 512M, starting with the card itself. |
| Closer Look: MSI R4850 512M | ||||||||||
We assume the unattractive, armored warrior on the R4850 512M box is supposed to inspire thoughts of power and domination. While the box art would probably frighten the average hobbit, we think it will just give the average human nightmares or at least remind you of your favorite The Loard of the Rings episode. All jokes aside, we are glad to see that MSI seems to keep its packaging to a relatively small size, especially with respect to this ever-greener world we live in. In addition to the card itself, MSI packs a handful of accessories in the box, including a couple quick user's guides, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, an S-video-to-composite adapter, an HDTV cable and a software CD.
The included software CD contains some unique, MSI-developed software and utilities. The CD includes the following software:
As far as the card design is concerned, the MSI R4850 512M doesn't differ from the ATI reference design. On the other hand, the cooler is a drastic change from the reference design. Unlike the reference 4850 cooler, the MSI R4850 512M cooler will take up an extra expansion slot in users systems. Some people will see that as a negative, but we always try to avoid using the slot near the video card anyway, for better thermal performance.
As you can see, the rather large cooler features a big fan, four beefy copper heatpipes, and a heatsink with numerous fins. With all these features, it's easy to imagine that MSI has a solid offering with this cooler. We didn't have a reference 4850 on hand for comparison, but we've seen claims that this custom cooler helps keep the GPU at least 10-20°C cooler when idle and under load than ATI's reference cooler, which is pretty impressive. In addition to cooling well, the cooler stays relatively quiet thanks that 80mm fan that doesn't have to spin as fast as a smaller fan would. To summarize, the cooler is both very effective and surprisingly quiet, just the way we like it.
The first two pictures above give you a good look at the two CrossFireX connectors found on the R4850 512M. CrossFireX technology allows you to use two 4850s simultaneously on motherboards that support the technology to boost 3D performance.
As we have come to expect from cards of this caliber, the R4850 512M requires a direct connection to the power supply, as indicated by the black, 6-pin PCI Express power connector on the edge of the board. Additionally, you'll find two DVI display output connectors and an S-video output on the other side of the card. |
| Test System and 3DMark Vantage Performance | ||||||||||||
** Before getting to our test results, we should point out that the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP we used for reference testing, is overclocked to 755 MHz for the core (reference speed is 675 MHz), 1175 MHz for the memory (reference speed is 1100 MHz), and 1840 MHz for the shader clock (reference speed is 1688 MHz), which is actually a bit faster than the recently released GeForce 9800 GTX+.
The 3DMark Vantage results show the R4850 512M performing much better than the 256MB Radeon HD 3850, a bit better than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and right on par with the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP. At the same time, the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 bested the R4850 512M by a considerable margin, but both cards cost $70-100 more than MSI's R4850. |
| Company of Heroes Performance | ||||||
Our DirectX 10 Company of Heroes benchmark seems to favor the NVIDIA cards. The R4850 512M's scores were closer to the Radeon HD 4870's than we expected, and the R4850 512M couldn't keep up with the GeForce 9800 GTX, which we also didn't expect to see. |
| Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Performance | ||||||
The R4850 512M outperforms the 256MB Radeon HD 3850 as expected, but it doesn't quite keep up with any of the NVIDIA card in this test. Admittedly though, our test system or our test itself didn't create much differentiation between the top five graphics cards and the performance variance between cards is rather small for this group. |
| Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Performance | ||||||
At 1280x1024, the top five cards perform evenly for the most part, with the R4850 512M's results ending up right in between the GeForce 9800 GTX and the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP. In the 1600x1200 tests, the R4850 512M doesn't quite keep up with the two top cards (the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260), but it does land in between the GeForce 9800 GTX and the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP once again. |
| Crysis Performance | ||||||
While the R4850 512M outperforms the Radeon HD 3850 by a considerable margin, it can't quite match the performance of any of the other cards. Even the GeForce 9800 GTX manages at least a 2 FPS lead at each resolution.
The DX10 results are a little different from the DX9 results. The MSI R4850 512M performs basically the same as the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP and even almost matches the Radeon HD 4870. These results are a good reminder that the performance you get out of your video card depends significantly on other components in your system, especially the CPU. In other words, a faster CPU would definitely result in a bigger spread in the results. |
| Overclocking the R4850 512M | ||||
Per our usual process, we set out to see if the R4850 512M sample we tested was a good overclocker. Because of the card's efficient cooler, we were optimistic that we could push the core and memory clocks beyond the defaults (625 MHz and 993 MHz, respectively) to respectable new heights.
After slowly bumping up the clocks and checking stability with 3DMark Vantage and Crysis, we finally hit a wall with the GPU core at 685 MHz and the memory at 1,100 MHz, a 9.6% and 10.8% bump, respectively. You can see a couple examples of the resulting performance increase in the graphs below. As always, keep in mind that your mileage will vary, and overclocking may void your warranty.
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| Performance Summary and Final Thoughts | ||||||
Performance Summary: With the exception of the Company of Heroes testing, the MSI R4850 512M performed on par with the reference GeForce 9800 GTX and the overclocked ASUS EN9800GTX TOP, which is what we expected considering the GeForce 9800 GTX+ was released (and priced) to compete directly with the Radeon HD 4850. At times, the R4850 512M even kept up with the more powerful Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260, but those results would most likely change if a faster host processor is used.
What is so great about the MSI R4850 512M is how much performance you get for your hard-earned dollar. And that performance isn't just about FPS. You also get excellent cooling performance. The standard MSI R4850 with the reference ATI cooler can be purchased online for about $190 at the time of this publication. For only $5 more (or about $195), you can grab an MSI R4850 512M with the custom cooler like we reviewed here. That seems like a no-brainer to us. If you want an MSI Radeon HD 4850, opt for the R4850 512M unless you absolutely can't take up an extra slot in your system. To be fair to other Radeon HD 4850s out there, we have to mention that the MSI R4850 512M is a bit more expensive than many of the other 4850s that we found online. If you like the R4850 512M and are okay with its price, then we doubt you'll be disappointed if you decide to purchase one (or two). On the other hand, if you just want the cheapest 4850 currently available, then you should shop around a bit before making your decision.
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