An ATI video card, by XFX? OMGWTFBBQ?!
If you're anything like us (and there's a very good chance you are), you've just looked at the picture to the right, and felt a funny tingly feeling in your groinal region. Not just because it looks so sexy (think hybrid stealth bomber postbox), but because of who made it - XFX. On the 17th of December last year XFX announced a deal it had secured with AMD/ATI to begin producing that flavour of graphics cards. This doesn't mean that they're going to stop manufacturing NVIDIA cards - but we can now get both of them!
Out of its already quite impressive range of ATI's four-series cards, we grabbed the very coolest one and slammed it unceremoniously into our test rig to grab some benchmark scores. Before even that happened, we spent a few minutes caressing the card. The very first thing that we noticed, that you sadly can't see in the picture, is that the PCB is coated in a very impressive matte black material, leaving only the components and mounting screws uncovered. This coating makes the circuit traces stand out, and is going to look particularly good in a windowed case.
Flipping over, you can clearly see the tough plastic shroud. This is made up of predominantly sharp and angular lines, the edges slanting away powerfully, hinting at the power beneath. Even the fan receives this treatment, framed in an octagonal shape as opposed to circular, and the whole shroud is designed unlike anything else we've seen. Since it's as good a time as any to say it, XFX designers - keep up the hard work!
Underneath the tough shell is an even tougher heatsink, consisting of a large block onto which aluminium fins are extruded, allowing airflow across and through these fins, taking heat and dumping it out the back of the case. Twin DVI ports (with red plastic inserts instead of the standard white), analogue video out, dual Crossfire nipple tabs, and a 6-pin power connector round up the rest of the features on the card.
We couldn't read the temperatures through our usual method (GPUz reported a core temperature of minus a degree, and a PCB temperature of 32767.5 degrees - considering that the surface of the sun is only 6000, we thought this was a little...off), so instead used our alternative. Under load, the shell became uncomfortable to touch, but never burningly hot, and idle was merely warm. For some more precise measurement, the card made 68.4dBA load and 63.9dBA idle - rather loud, and much louder than the reference cooler.
The packaging for this card is very nice as well, with everything fit snugly into place. You'll get the card, power cable, DVI to VGA and HDMI adaptors, as well as driver CD and a manual. Sadly, you don't get a game; this is something that would have sweetened the deal somewhat.
As the title would suggest, this card is a 4850, running the RV770 PRO core at a core speed of 650MHz, a very modest increase of only 25MHz. The memory runs noticeably higher, an increase of 57MHz over the stock of 993MHz, giving the 256-bit bus plenty of wriggle room to keep the half-gigabyte of memory filled.
Performance is great compared to the stock card however, with Crysis getting an average of two more frames per second, and GRID giving a smoothly playable result - though it did dip down in areas when large objects drew in. Synthetic benchmarks are nice too, with a very tasty result in both 3DMark programs.
If you can stand a little noise, you'll love XFX's first foray into the Red Zone, and we'd have no worries recommending this card to any enthusiast!
Issue: 106 | November, 2009