MSI R4850 Review

gotdamojo06 - August 10, 2008
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Testing:

I am very interested and excited to see how the new MSI R4850 GPU from ATI will compare when it is tested using a few different video benchmarks to measure the card's performance. I will be putting the MSI R4850 up against a few different video cards that are out on the market, including the PowerColor HD4850. I am also extremely interested in seeing how the cooling solution MSI has added to their R4850 is going to handle the temperatures. All of the settings will be set at stock for all of the cards; I will also be overclocking the HD4850 to the maximum level so that I can compare the difference in performance when overclocked, and see how beneficial it is to overclock all components in your system.

Processor: Intel Q9450 Core 2 Quad 333x8
Motherboard: Gigabyte X48-DQ6
Memory: Mushkin XP2 Redline 8000 2 x 2GB 5-5-5-12
Video Card(s): Sapphire HD4850 w/ Catalyst 8.6
Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB SATA
Optical Drive: LiteOn DVD+/-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

MSI R4850: Core - 700MHz Memory - 1187MHz

When it comes to overclocking the MSI R4850, I used a piece of software called AMD GPU Clock Tool. The MSI R4850 was an extremely easy card to overclock; I was able to get it up to 700MHz stable on the core very quickly, and was able to jump around 15MHz every increment. I was able to get it all the way up to 725MHz, however it was unstable and unable to run 3DMark06 all the way though. I feel that if I were to perform a voltmod to the card, I would be able to achieve a higher overclock - maybe near 750MHz. During the overclocking process, the temperatures did not go up more than a few degrees; however, after those few degrees, the final temperature was between 62 to 64 degrees Celsius under a full load.