# HD 4800 series: an everlasting solution or a milestone for AMD?



## PCpraiser100 (Mar 17, 2008)

As many people know, AMD has just released the all new HD 4800 series of video cards: the cheap welterweight HD 4850, the heavy-duty HD 4870, and the red devil that will be coming soon, the HD 4870 X2. The cards are awesome in action on game benchmarks, and even break into the game that was known to put computers down to their knees, Crysis, especially when Xfire'd together. But what really seems to got me going with these to-good-to-be-true graphics solutions is how AMD did it in order to earn the performance crown. One of the most biggest improvement is that AMD completely redesigned the Core's ring bus. which can be shown here:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=9

With this big change, the HD 4800 series is almost completely immune to Anti-Aliasing performance impacts on most of today's popular titles, such examples are shown here:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=10

Now moving on to Xfire performance, since Xfire is by the looks of it in this series' blood, I feel like showing it off as its more than true:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14990/12
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=20

NOTE: If Xfire performance doesn't kick in on DX10 Nvidia games like Crysis, you are probably on an X38 or P35 based motherboard as they don't support CrossfireX too well, also the fact that ANY of today's Intel motherboards don't scale well with more than two of these cards so thats another thing to worry about. Rumors say that the upcoming X58 and P55 chipsets might resolve most of these performance issues.

Even though ATI looks pretty good so far with this new generation of graphics cards in many cases, wherever you go to view this series in degrees celcius, it will always be bad. These cards seem to have a good future in cooking not cooling as the fan speed in the BIOS is low, I assume that this was somewhat necessary to achieve in power saving as these cards will be like its older chunky power user, the HD 2900XT, as it will reach over 500 watts if not managed. Some people managed to overcome this problem by doing a little bit of advanced tweaking in profiles. I'm waiting for revisions from Sapphire as they know a lot on how to solve these cooling problems, without much dependency of more wattage, such as the ATOMIC or TOXIC series. Check out these temperature comparisons that they ain't too pretty:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14990/15

I'm pretty sure AMD will solve this problem some day, but in the mean time, don't buy these cards if you want to put it in a Dell case or something.

I really want to buy one of these cards as they are now legendary in performance but due to the problems, I'll have to wait until they are solved. So just to let you know and thank you for reading. Replies will be taken and I don't mind being proven wrong if I missed anything.


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## ISDP (Jul 24, 2008)

Wow the idle power requirements are crazy. Although benchmarks for the cards are promising and a great price tag the power consumption needs to be addressed. hopefully a driver update can optimize it for lower power requirements. ATI is on the right track though which is good to see.


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